Twitter Privacy Policy
Twitter instantly connects people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them. Any registered user can send a Tweet, which is a message of 140 characters or less that is public by default and can include other content like photos, videos, and links to other websites.
Tip What you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly.
This Privacy Policy describes how and when Twitter collects, uses and shares your information when you use our Services. Twitter receives your information through our various websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, and commerce services (the “Services” or “Twitter”) and from our partners and other third parties. For example, you send us information when you use Twitter from our website, post or receive Tweets via SMS, 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 you reside in or supply information from, you authorize Twitter to use your information in the United States and any other country where Twitter operates.
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@twitter.com or here.
Information Collection and Use
Tip We collect and use your information below to provide our Services and to measure and improve them over time.
Basic Account Information: When you create or reconfigure a Twitter account, you provide some personal information, such as your name, username, password, and email address. In some cases, you may be required to provide your phone number, for example, to use Twitter via SMS or to help us prevent spam, fraud, or abuse. Your name and username are listed publicly on our Services, including on your profile page and in search results. Some Services, such as search and public user profiles, do not require registration.
Additional Information: You may provide us with profile information to make public, such as a short biography, your location, your website, or a picture. You may provide information to customize your account, such as a cell phone number for the delivery of SMS messages. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services or to market to you. You may use your account settings to unsubscribe from notifications from Twitter. You may also unsubscribe by following the instructions contained within the notification or the instructions on our website. We may use your contact information to help others find your Twitter account, including through third-party services and client applications. Your privacy settings control whether others can find you by your email address or cell phone number. You may choose to upload your address book so that we can help you find Twitter users you know or help other Twitter users find you. We may later make suggestions to you and other users on Twitter based on imported address book contacts. You can delete your imported address book contacts from Twitter at any time. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request. If you connect your Twitter account to your account on another service in order to cross-post between Twitter and that service, the other service may send us your registration or profile information on that service and other information that you authorize. This information enables cross-posting, helps us improve the Services, and is deleted from Twitter within a few weeks of your disconnecting from Twitter your account on the other service. Learn more here. 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 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 that result from your use of the Services. We may use this information to customize the content we show you, including ads. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide public for as long as you do not delete it from Twitter, but we generally give you settings to make the information more private if you want. Our Services broadly and instantly disseminate your public information to a wide range of users, customers, and services. For instance, your public user profile information and public Tweets are immediately delivered via SMS and our APIs to our partners and other third parties, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate Twitter content into their services, and institutions such as universities and public health agencies that analyze the information for trends and insights. When you share information or content like photos, videos, and links via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are making public.
Location Information: You may choose to publish your location in your Tweets and in your Twitter profile. You may also tell us your location when you set your trend location on Twitter.com or your computer or mobile device sends us location information. We may also use other data from your device to determine location, for example, information about wireless networks or cell towers near your mobile device, or your IP address. We may use and store information about your location to provide features of our Services, such as Tweeting with your location, and to improve and customize the Services, for example, with more relevant content like local trends, stories, ads, and suggestions for people to follow. Learn more about Twitter’s use of location here, and how to set your location preferences here.
Links: Twitter may keep track of how you interact with links across our Services, including our email notifications, third-party services, and client applications, by redirecting clicks or through other means. We do this to help improve our Services, to provide more relevant 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 cookies and similar technologies 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. 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 customize and improve our Services. Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by changing its settings, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit. However, some Services may not function properly if you disable cookies. Learn more about how we use cookies and similar technologies here.
Log Data: When you use our Services, we may receive information (“Log Data”) such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, location, your mobile carrier, device information (including device and application IDs), search terms, and cookie information. We receive Log Data when you interact with our Services, for example, when you visit our websites, sign into our Services, interact with our email notifications, use your Twitter account to authenticate to a third-party website or application, or visit a third-party website that includes a Twitter button or widget. We may also receive Log Data when you click on, view or interact with a link on our Services to a third-party application, such as when you choose to install another application through Twitter. Twitter uses Log Data to provide, understand, and improve our Services. If not already done earlier, for example, as provided below for Widget Data, we will either delete Log Data or remove any common account identifiers, such as your username, full IP address, or email address, after 18 months.
Widget Data: We may tailor the Services for you based on your visits to third-party websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets. When these websites first load our buttons or widgets for display, we receive Log Data that includes the web page you visited and a cookie that identifies your browser (“Widget Data”). After a maximum of 10 days, we start the process of deleting, de-identifying, or aggregating Widget Data, which is usually instantaneous but in some cases may take up to a week. We may use Widget Data to tailor content for you, such as suggestions for people to follow on Twitter and other content you may be interested in. Tailored content is stored with only browser cookies or device IDs and is separated from other Widget Data such as page-visit information. Learn more about the feature, including how you can suspend it or turn it off, here. For Tweets, Log Data, and other information that we receive from interactions with Twitter buttons or widgets, please see the other sections of this Privacy Policy.
Commerce Services: You may provide your payment information, including your credit or debit card number, card expiration date, CVV code, and billing address (collectively, “Payment Information”), along with your shipping address, to complete a commerce transaction on Twitter. You may also provide your credit or debit card number to register for card-linked services, such as offers. To facilitate future purchases on Twitter, we store your Payment Information, excluding CVV code, and shipping address, which you can remove from your account at any time using your account settings. We consider your Payment Information and shipping address private and do not make such information public. We collect and store information created by your purchases made on Twitter (“Transaction Data”). If you register your credit or debit card with Twitter for card-linked services, we receive information about the card transactions from a third-party payment services provider (“Registered Card Data”). Transaction Data and Registered Card Data may include the merchant’s name and the date, time and amount of the transaction. Twitter uses Registered Card Data to verify eligibility for card-linked services, and may also use Registered Card Data to limit the number of offers available to you and keep track of your offers.
Third-Parties and Affiliates: Twitter uses a variety of third-party services to help provide our Services, such as hosting our various blogs and wikis, and to help us understand and improve the use of our Services, such as Google Analytics. These third-party service providers may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP address. Third-party ad partners may share information with us, like a browser cookie ID, website URL visited, mobile device ID, or cryptographic hash of a common account identifier (such as an email address), to help us measure and tailor ads. For example, this allows us to display ads about things you may have already shown interest in. If you prefer, you can turn off tailored ads in your privacy settings so that your account is not matched to information shared by ad partners for tailoring ads. Learn more about your privacy options here and about how Twitter ads work here. We may also receive information about you from our corporate affiliates in order to help provide, understand, and improve our Services and our affiliates’ services, including the delivery of ads.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
TipWe do not disclose your private personal information except in the limited circumstances described here.
Your Consent: We may share or disclose your information at your direction, such as when you authorize a third-party web client or application to access your Twitter account.
Service Providers: We engage service providers to perform functions and provide services to us in the United States and abroad. We may share your private personal information with such service providers subject to confidentiality obligations consistent with this Privacy Policy, and on the condition that the third parties use your private personal data only on our behalf and pursuant to our instructions. We share your Payment Information with payment services providers to process payments; prevent, detect and investigate fraud or other prohibited activities; facilitate dispute resolution such as chargebacks or refunds; and for other purposes associated with the acceptance of credit or debit cards. We may share your credit or debit card number with payment services providers, or third parties authorized by them, to monitor card transactions at participating merchants and track redemption activity for the purposes of providing card-linked services.
Sellers of Goods and Services: If you buy goods or services on Twitter, we may provide the seller, commerce provider or marketplace with your name, email address, shipping address, Payment Information and Transaction Data to facilitate payment processing, order fulfilment and dispute resolution (including payment and shipping disputes) and to help prevent, detect and investigate fraud or other prohibited activities. Please refer to these third parties’ privacy policies for information about their privacy practices.
Law and Harm: Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Policy, 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. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party’s, including a government’s, request to disclose your information.
Business Transfers and Affiliates: 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. This Privacy Policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity. We may also disclose information about you to our corporate affiliates in order to help provide, understand, and improve our Services and our affiliates’ services, including the delivery of ads.
Non-Private or Non-Personal Information: We may share or disclose your non-private, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public user profile information, public Tweets, the people you follow or that follow you, or the number of users who clicked on a particular link (even if only one did), or reports to advertisers about unique users who saw or clicked on their ads after we have removed any private personal information (such as your name or contact information).
Modifying Your Personal Information
If you are a registered user of our Services, we provide you with tools and account settings 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, 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 after deactivation 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 persons 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. You can find additional resources for parents and teens here.
EU Safe Harbor Framework
Twitter complies with the U.S.-E.U. and U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor Privacy Principles of notice, choice, onward transfer, security, data integrity, access, and enforcement. To learn more about the Safe Harbor program, and to view our certification, please visit the U.S. Department of Commerce website.
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 https://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 email to the email address 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: September 8, 2014
Archive of Previous Privacy Policies
Thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy? Please, let us know.