Twitter Privacy Policy
Our Services instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them. Any registered user of the Twitter Services 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 the Twitter Services may be viewed all around the world instantly. You are what you Tweet!
This Privacy Policy (“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, commerce services (the “Twitter 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.
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. Irrespective of which country you reside in or supply information from, you authorize Twitter to use your information in the United States, Ireland, and any other country where Twitter operates.
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us here or at privacy@twitter.com.
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 an account, you provide some personal information, such as your name, username, password, email address, or phone number. On the Twitter Services, 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. Some Twitter Services, such as searching and viewing public user profiles, do not require registration.
Contact Information: You may use your contact information, such as your email address or phone number, to customize your account or enable Services, for example, for login verification, Twitter via SMS, or Digits by Twitter. If you provide Twitter with your phone number, you agree to receive text messages to that number from Twitter. When you use Digits by Twitter to sign up for or login to a third-party application, you are directing Twitter to share your contact information, such as your phone number, with that application. 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 the Twitter Services. You may also unsubscribe from a notification by following the instructions contained within the notification or the instructions on our website. Your privacy settings control whether others can find you on the Twitter Services by your email address or phone number.
Additional Information: You may provide us with profile information to make public on the Twitter Services, such as a short biography, your location, your website, or a picture. You may choose to upload your address book so that we can help you find users you know or help other users find you. We may later make suggestions to you and other users based on imported address book contacts. You can delete your imported address book contacts at any time. Learn more here. 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. 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 through the Twitter Services is information you are asking us to make public. 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; the language, country, and time zone associated with your account; and the lists you create, people you follow, Tweets you mark as likes or Retweet, and many other bits of information that result from your use of the Twitter Services. We may use this information to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, and to customize the content we show you, including ads. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide through the Twitter Services public for as long as you do not delete it, but we generally give you settings or features, like direct messages, to make the information more private if you want. The Twitter 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: Twitter 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: 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 or mobile device. 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 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 links on our Services, including links to third-party applications, such as when you choose to install another application through Twitter. Twitter uses Log Data to provide, understand, and improve our Services, to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, and to customize the content we show you, including ads. 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 a maximum of 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 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 through our Services. You may also provide your credit or debit card number to register for card-linked services, such as offers. 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. We collect and store information created by your purchases made through our Services (“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 or card network (“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 off of our Services. If you prefer, you can turn off tailored ads in your privacy settings so that your account will not be matched to information shared by ad partners for tailoring ads. Learn more about your privacy options here and about how ads work on our Services 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
Tip: 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. 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 on the Twitter Services. If you’ve shared information, like direct messages or protected Tweets, with another user who accesses the Twitter Services 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. 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. We may share your credit or debit card number with payment services providers or card networks 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 through our Services, 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, legal process, or governmental 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).
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 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. Absent a separate arrangement between you and Twitter 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 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 here. 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: May 18, 2015
Archive of Previous Privacy Policies
Thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy? Please, let us know.