Privacy Policy

Twitter Privacy Policy

Our Services instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them. For example, any registered user of Twitter can send a Tweet, which is public by default, and can include a message of 140 characters or less and content like photos, videos, and links to other websites.

What you share on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly. You are what you Tweet!

This Privacy Policy describes how and when we collect, use and share your information across our websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, commerce services, and our other covered services that link to this Policy (collectively, the “Services”), and from our partners and other third parties. For example, you send us information when you use our Services on the web, via SMS, or 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, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. This includes any information you choose to provide that is deemed sensitive under applicable law.

When this policy mentions “we” or “us,” it refers to the controller of your information under this policy. If you live in the United States, your information is controlled by Twitter, Inc., 1355 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103 U.S.A. If you live outside the United States, the data controller responsible for your information is Twitter International Company, an Irish company with its registered office at The Academy, 42 Pearse Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Despite this, you alone control and are responsible for the posting of your Tweets and other content you submit through the Services, as provided in the Terms of Service and Twitter Rules.

Irrespective of which country you live in, you authorize us to transfer, store, and use your information in the United States, Ireland, and any other country where we operate. In some of these countries, the privacy and data protection laws and rules regarding when government authorities may access data may vary from those in the country where you live.

If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please submit a request through our form, available at https://support.twitter.com/forms/privacy.

Information Collection and Use

We collect and use your information below to provide, understand, and improve our Services.

Basic Account Information: If you choose to create a Twitter account, you must provide us with some personal information, such as your name, username, password, email address, or phone number. On Twitter, your name and username are listed publicly, including on your profile page and in search results, and you can use either your real name or a pseudonym. You can create and manage multiple Twitter accounts. If you use Digits by Twitter, the contact information you provide to log in is not public. Some of our product features, such as searching and viewing public Twitter user profiles or watching a Periscope broadcast on Twitter, do not require you to create an account.

Contact Information: You may use your contact information, such as your email address or phone number, to customize your account or enable certain account features, for example, for login verification or Twitter via SMS. If you provide us with your phone number, you agree to receive text messages to that number from us. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services, to market to you, to help prevent spam, fraud, or abuse, and to help others find your account, including through third-party services and client applications. You may use your settings for email and mobile notifications to control notifications you receive from Twitter. You may also unsubscribe from a notification by following the instructions contained within the notification or the instructions on our website. Your Discoverability privacy settings control whether others can find you on Twitter by your email address or phone number.

Additional Information: You may choose to provide us with additional information to help improve and personalize your experience across our Services. For example, you may choose to upload and sync your address book so that we can help you find and connect with users you know or help other users find and connect with you. We may later tailor content, such as making suggestions or showing user accounts and Tweets for you and other users, based on imported address book contacts. You can delete your imported address book contacts at any time by visiting your Contacts Dashboard in your privacy settings. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request. If you connect your account on our Services to your account on another service in order to cross-post between our Services 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 our Services within a few weeks of your disconnecting from our Services your account on the other service.

Tweets, Following, Lists, Profile, and other Public Information: Twitter is primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide us through Twitter is information you are asking us to make public. You may provide us with profile information to make public on Twitter, such as a short biography, your location, your website, date of birth, or a picture. Additionally, your public information includes the messages you Tweet; the metadata provided with Tweets, such as when you Tweeted and the client application you used to Tweet; information about your account, such as creation time, language, country, and time zone; and the lists you create, people you follow, and Tweets you Like or Retweet. Twitter broadly and instantly disseminates your public information to a wide range of users, customers, and services, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate Twitter content into their services, and organizations such as universities, public health agencies, and market research firms 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. We may use this information to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide through the Services public for as long as you do not delete it, but we generally give you settings or features, like protected Tweets, to make the information more private if you want. For certain profile information fields we provide you with visibility settings to select who can see this information in your profile. If you provide us with profile information and you don’t see a visibility setting, that information is public. You can change the language and time zone associated with your account at any time using your account settings, available at http://twitter.com/settings/account.

Direct Messages and Non-Public Communications: We provide certain features that allow you to communicate more privately. For example, you can use Direct Messages to have private conversations with other Twitter users. When you privately communicate with others through our Services, such as by sending and receiving Direct Messages, we will store and process your communications, and information related to them. Please note that if you interact with public Twitter content shared with you via Direct Message, for instance by liking a Tweet shared via Direct Message, those interactions may be public. While features like Direct Messages are intended to be private, please remember that recipients may copy, store, and re-share the contents of your communications.

Location Information: We may receive information about your location. For example, 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. We may also determine location by using other data from your device, such as precise location information from GPS, 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 our use of location here, and how to set your location preferences here.

Links: We 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. Links, Tweets, and non-public communications like Direct Messages shared on the Services will be processed and links shortened to a http://t.co link.

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 or mobile device. We 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. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, some browsers’ settings can be modified to decline cookies or alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer. However, some Services may not function properly if you disable cookies. We honor the Do Not Track browser option to give you control over how your website visits are used to personalize your Twitter experience and ads. Learn more about our Do Not Track support here, and about how we use cookies and similar technologies here.

Using Our Services: We receive information when you interact with our Services, even if you have not created an account (“Log Data”). For example, when you visit our websites, sign into our Services, interact with our email notifications, use your account to authenticate to a third-party website, application, or service, or visit a third-party website, application, or service that includes a Twitter button or widget, we may receive information about you. This Log Data may include 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, or cookie information. We also receive Log Data when you click on, view or interact with links on our Services, including links to third-party applications, such as when you choose to install another application through Twitter. We use Log Data to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, and to customize the content we show you, including ads. We keep Log Data as needed for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. We will either delete Log Data or remove any common account identifiers, such as your username, full IP address, email address, or phone number, after a maximum of 18 months, if not sooner as provided below for Widget Data.

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 and other content you may be interested in. Tailored content is stored separately from other Widget Data such as page-visit information. You can control this feature from the Personalization Setting within your Privacy Settings, available at https://twitter.com/settings/safety.

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 through our Services. To facilitate future purchases, 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. To facilitate order fulfillment, we collect and store information created by your purchases made through our Services (“Transaction Data”). Transaction Data may include the merchant’s name and the date, time, and amount of the transaction.

Advertising: Our Services are supported by advertising. We may use the information described in this Privacy Policy to help make our advertising more relevant to you, to measure its effectiveness and to help recognize your devices to serve you ads on and off of Twitter. For example, when you interact with content in the Twitter for Android app, we may show content (including ads) about those same topics when you use Twitter on the web. We do not use the content you share privately in Direct Messages to serve you ads. Our Twitter Ads Policy also prohibits advertisers from targeting ads based on categories we consider sensitive, such as race, religion, politics, sex life, or health. If you prefer, you can uncheck the Promoted Content setting within your Privacy Settings so that your account will not be matched to information collected by ad partners, or by us directly on those partners’ websites or apps, to tailor ads to you. Learn more about your privacy options for tailored ads here and about how ads work on our Services here.

Third-Parties and Affiliates: We may receive information about you from third parties, such as other Twitter users, partners (including ad partners), or our corporate affiliates. For example, other users may share or disclose information about you, such as when they mention you, share a photo of you, or tag you in a photo. Your privacy settings control who can tag you in a photo. Our ad partners and affiliates may share information with us such as a browser cookie ID, mobile device ID, or cryptographic hash of a common account identifier (such as an email address), as well as demographic or interest data and content viewed or actions taken on a website or app. Our ad partners, particularly our advertisers, may enable us to collect similar information directly from their website or app by integrating our advertising technology.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

We do not disclose your private personal information except in the limited circumstances described here.

User Consent or Direction: 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 account or when you direct us to share your feedback with a business. When you use Digits by Twitter to sign up for or log in to a third-party application, you are directing us to share your contact information, such as your phone number, with that application. If you’ve shared information, like Direct Messages or protected Tweets, with another user who accesses Twitter through a third-party service, keep in mind that the information may be shared with the third-party service.

Service Providers: We engage service providers to perform functions and provide services to us in the United States, Ireland, and other countries. For example, we use 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. We may share your private personal information with such service providers subject to obligations consistent with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures, 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.

Commerce Transactions: If you make a payment as part of a commerce transaction through our Services, we may provide the seller, commerce provider, marketplace, or charity with your name, email address, shipping address, Payment Information and Transaction Data to facilitate payment processing, order fulfillment, 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 Privacy Policy, we may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect our or our users’ 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 we are 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.

Public or Non-Personal Information: We may share or disclose your public, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public user profile information, public Tweets, the people you follow or that follow you, the number of times people engaged with a Tweet (for example, the number of users who clicked on a particular link or voted on a poll in a Tweet, 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). Remember: your privacy and visibility settings control whether your Tweets and certain profile information are made public. Other information, like your name and username, is always public on Twitter, unless you delete your account, as described below.

Accessing and Modifying Your Personal Information

If you are a registered user of our Services, we provide you with tools and account settings to access, correct, delete, or modify the personal information you provided to us and associated with your account. You can download certain account information, including your Tweets, by following the instructions here and request access to additional information here.

You can also permanently delete your Twitter account. If you follow the instructions here, your account will be deactivated and then deleted. When deactivated, your account, including your name, username, and public profile, 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. Absent a separate arrangement between you and us to extend your deactivation period, after 30 days, we begin the process of deleting your account from our systems, which can take up to a week.

Keep in mind that search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your user profile information and public Tweets, even after you have deleted the information from the Twitter Services or deactivated your account. Learn more here.

Our Global Operations

To bring you the Services, we operate globally. Twitter, Inc. complies with the EU-US Privacy Shield principles (the “Principles”) regarding the collection, use, sharing, and retention of personal information from the European Union, as described in our Privacy Shield certification.

If you have a Privacy Shield-related complaint, please contact us here. As part of our participation in Privacy Shield, if you have a dispute with us about our adherence to the Principles, we will seek to resolve it through our internal complaint resolution process, alternatively through the independent dispute resolution body JAMS, and under certain conditions, through the Privacy Shield arbitration process.

Privacy Shield participants are subject to the investigatory and enforcement powers of the US Federal Trade Commission and other authorized statutory bodies. Under certain circumstances, participants may be liable for the transfer of personal information from the EU to third parties outside the EU. Learn more about Privacy Shield here.

As described in this Privacy Policy, we may share information with our corporate affiliates and third parties and may be required to disclose information in response to valid governmental requests, including under applicable law enforcement or national security requirements. Learn more about our global operations and data transfer here.

Twitter, Inc. also complies with the US-Swiss Safe Harbor Framework and principles, as described in our certification, and applies the Privacy Shield Principles to information from Switzerland.

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 30, 2016

Archive of Previous Privacy Policies

Thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy? Please, let us know by contacting us here or writing to us at the appropriate address below.

For accounts based in the United States:

Twitter, Inc.
Attn: Privacy Policy Inquiry
1355 Market Street, Suite 900
San Francisco, CA 94103

For accounts outside the United States: