Twitter Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy describes Twitter's policies and procedures on the collection, use and disclosure of your information. Twitter receives your information through our various web sites, SMS, APIs, applications, services and third-parties ("Services"). For example, you send us information when you use Twitter from our web site, post or receive Tweets via SMS, add a Twitter widget to your website, or access Twitter from an application such as Twitter for Mac, Twitter for Android or TweetDeck. When using any of our Services you consent to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. Irrespective of which country that you reside in or create information from, your information may be used by Twitter in the United States or any other country where Twitter operates.
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@twitter.com.
Information Collection and Use
Tip We collect and use your information to provide and measure use of our Services and improve them over time.
Information Collected Upon Registration: When you create or reconfigure a Twitter account, you provide some personal information, such as your name, username, password, and email address. Some of this information, for example, your name and username, is listed publicly on our Services, including on your profile page and in search results. Some Services, such as search, public user profiles and viewing lists, do not require registration.
Additional Information: You may provide us with additional information to make public, such as a short biography, your location, or a picture. You may customize your account with information such as a cell phone number for the delivery of SMS messages or your address book so that we can help you find Twitter users you know. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services or to market to you. You may unsubscribe from these messages by following the instructions contained within the messages or the instructions on our web site. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request. Providing the additional information described in this section is entirely optional.
Tweets, Following, Lists and other Public Information: Our Services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public. This includes not only the messages you Tweet and the metadata provided with Tweets, such as when you Tweeted, but also the lists you create, the people you follow, the Tweets you mark as favorites or Retweet and many other bits of information. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide public but we generally give you settings (http://twitter.com/account/settings) to make the information more private if you want. Your public information is broadly and instantly disseminated. For example, your public Tweets are searchable by many search engines and are immediately delivered via SMS and our APIs (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_faq) to a wide range of users and services. You should be careful about all information that will be made public by Twitter, not just your Tweets.
Tip What you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly.
Location Information: You may choose to note your location in your Tweets and in your Twitter profile. If you turn on Tweeting with your location, we may also save exact coordinates to help improve our service. You can control your location information settings in your account settings (http://twitter.com/account/settings).
Log Data: Our servers automatically record information ("Log Data") created by your use of the Services. Log Data may include information such as your IP address, browser type, the referring domain, pages visited, your mobile carrier, device and application IDs, and search terms. Other actions, such as interactions with our website, applications and advertisements, may also be included in Log Data. If we haven’t already deleted the Log Data earlier, we will either delete it or remove any common account identifiers, such as your username, full IP address, or email address, after 18 months.
Links: Twitter may keep track of how you interact with links in Tweets across our Services including third party services and clients by redirecting clicks or through other means. We do this to help improve our Services, including advertising, and to be able to share aggregate click statistics such as how many times a particular link was clicked on.
Cookies: Like many websites, we use "cookie" technology to collect additional website usage data and to improve our Services, but we do not require cookies for many parts of our Services such as searching and looking at public user profiles or lists. A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your computer's hard disk. Twitter may use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our Services, to monitor aggregate usage by our users and web traffic routing on our Services, and to improve our Services. Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by editing its options, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit.
Third Party Services: Twitter uses a variety of services hosted by third parties to help provide our Services, such as hosting our various blogs and wikis, and to help us understand the use of our Services, such as Google Analytics. These services may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP request.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
Tip We do not disclose your private information except in the limited circumstances described here.
Your Consent: We may share or disclose your information with your consent, such as when you use a third party web client or application to access your Twitter account.
Service Providers: We engage certain trusted third parties to perform functions and provide services to us. We may share your personal information with these third parties, but only to the extent necessary to perform these functions and provide such services, and only pursuant to obligations mirroring the protections of this privacy policy.
Law and Harm: We may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect Twitter's rights or property.
Business Transfers: In the event that Twitter is involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. The promises in this privacy policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity.
Non-Private or Non-Personal Information: We may share or disclose your non-private, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public Tweets or the number of users who clicked on a particular link (even if only one did).
Modifying Your Personal Information
If you are a registered user of our Services, we provide you with tools to access or modify the personal information you provided to us and associated with your account.
You can also permanently delete your Twitter account. If you follow the instructions here (https://support.twitter.com/articles/15358-how-to-deactivate-your-account), your account will be deactivated and then deleted. When your account is deactivated, it is not viewable on Twitter.com. For up to 30 days it is still possible to restore your account if it was accidentally or wrongfully deactivated. After 30 days, we begin the process of deleting your account from our systems, which can take up to a week.
Our Policy Towards Children
Our Services are not directed to people under 13. If you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information without your consent, please contact us at privacy@twitter.com. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we become aware that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we take steps to remove such information and terminate the child's account.
Changes to this Policy
We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time. The most current version of the policy will govern our use of your information and will always be at http://twitter.com/privacy. If we make a change to this policy that, in our sole discretion, is material, we will notify you via an @Twitter update or e-mail to the email associated with your account. By continuing to access or use the Services after those changes become effective, you agree to be bound by the revised Privacy Policy.
Effective: June 23, 2011
Archive of Previous Privacy Policies
Thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy? Please, let us know.