Developer terms
Last Update: October 22, 2014.
Tweeting With Location is the geotagging feature in the Twitter API. This feature helps to provide a more meaningful experience for users by making Tweets more contextual. For instance, “Fireworks!” is much more relevant when associated with a location: “Fireworks!” from the SoMa Neighborhood in San Francisco, California. We look forward to working with the developer ecosystem to create great experiences around this functionality!
To ensure a good and safe experience, developers should be sensitive to user privacy when dealing with their location as well as provide baseline consistency in the “Tweeting with Location” experience. Here are some key things to keep in mind that help protect user privacy and ensure users understand the impact of their actions:
A number of Twitter client apps have the original geotagging feature (which only broadcast lat/lons without providing place_IDs) implemented. The default behavior of the API mimics this behavior – i.e. as a developer you do not need to make any changes to your existing app in order to maintain the behavior that exists today. Indeed, if you simply pass a lat/lon coordinate in to Twitter, Twitter will automatically reverse geocode that latitude and longitude and display the place_ID in addition to lat/lon for areas where we have data available.
Ensure that it is transparent to your users that their exact coordinates are being used and displayed on Twitter. A best practice for existing apps would be to allow users to turn on or off their location on a per-Tweet basis. You can also enable your users to share only place_IDs instead of exact coordinates as a default, “sticky” setting.
Twitter will store data passed by the client as follows:
The addition of location to a Tweet adds an enormous amount of context and value from a user perspective. However, implementations of location in your client should be careful to take privacy and user transparency as a key consideration in designing a location-focused product.
If you have any questions or comments about privacy, location, and other geo features, please contact us.