How to use location services on mobile devices
Enabling location services through Twitter's official apps allows Twitter to periodically determine your precise location. This allows us to provide, develop, and improve a variety of our services, including but not limited to:
- Delivery of content, including Tweets and advertising, that is better tailored to your location.
- Delivery of location-specific trends.
- Showing your followers the location you are Tweeting from as part of your Tweet, if you decide to geotag your Tweet.
How does Twitter determine the precise location of my mobile device?
If you have location services enabled, Twitter may use a variety of signals to determine the precise location of your device, such as GPS, cell tower signal, and data about nearby wireless access points.
Whether or not you have location services enabled, if you own a wireless access point (e.g., if you have set up a wireless network), Twitter may use certain publicly broadcast information from that access point, such as its name/SSID, MAC address, frequency, and signal strength, to power Twitter's location services. If you prefer that Twitter not use data about your wireless access point in this way, you can opt out through the following options:
- Add “_nomap” to the end of your wireless network’s SSID. For example, if your wireless network SSID (name) is “TwitterHQ” you would modify this to “TwitterHQ_nomap”; or
- Prevent your wireless network from publicly broadcasting its SSID.