Twitter Is Tracking Users’ Installed Apps for Ad Targeting

blogs.wsj.com

14 points·tshtf··11 comments

Add Twitter mobile to your home screen. For me, it's exactly the same experience. Actually it's better! I don't get notifications about who to follow or some person tweeted or retweeted something!

Joke's on their advertisers, since I can hardly be the only person who routinely blocks promoted tweets.

How?

Block the entity making the tweet. If you spam my timeline, I don't want to see anything from your again, anyway.

I have “Limit Ad Tracking” turned on. Apparently it prevented Apps from collecting the list of applications on my iOS Devices.

I also enable “Opt out of interest-based ads” on my Android Devices.

At this point, I don't believe it's possible to be in favor of civil liberties and work with contextual advertising.

I can understand Android lets the app do that, because well, Android is Android, but... iOS too?!

There is no explicit way on iOS to check what other apps are installed, but they can check whether an URL scheme is supported, and from that you can infer the app is installed (not guaranteed, many apps can register the same scheme). If the app doesn't register a URL scheme I don't think there is a way to detect it.

Not 100% sure, but I think the facebook App does something similar.

> Not 100% sure, but I think the facebook App does something similar.

from the article: "A Facebook spokesperson said it also collects that data to help it tailor and target its ads. For example, the company might use it to help an app developer target ads to users that have already downloaded that developer’s other apps."

and its not even good. i see ad's for apps i have installed all the time.

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