It’s official: Billionaire Elon Musk now owns AND runs Twitter. Since the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has already thrown ideas about possible changesyou can move to clear your profile from deleting your old tweets or removing the tag from past conversations. You may even consider leaving the social media service completely. But before deleting (or Archive) all your tweets, there are some settings tweaks that can make you feel more secure. By changing your account privacy settings, you can control what information Twitter itself is allowed to share about you.
Twitter isn’t shy about sharing information with its business partners (read: advertisers) about you and your browsing habits. It goes through your data to help serve targeted ads to your feed, and also collects information about you when you visit a site that has a built-in tweet or tweet button.
Read more: Everything you need to know about Elon Musk buying Twitter
If you care more about keeping your data private than seeing ads in your feed that target your online habits and location, it’s easy to stop Twitter from sharing your information.
Twitter privacy settings
To stop Twitter from sharing your data with advertisers, tap your account picture in the top left and tap Settings and Support to expand the list. Next, go to Settings and privacy > Privacy and security and then scroll down and tap on Advertising Preferences. At the top is a switch to disable all personalization and data settings. You’ll find this setting on both Twitter for mobile and the web.
A toggle switch can prevent Twitter from collecting and sharing information about you.
Matt Elliott/CNET
I’ve turned them all off, but there are fine-grained controls for personalizing Twitter ads and the data Twitter can collect from your browsing history if you want to find a middle ground between keeping your data private and benefiting from an experience more personalized on Twitter.
If you go back to the privacy and security page in Settings, you’ll see a location information setting if you’re using Twitter on your phone where you can turn it off Exact location. Disabling this setting prevents Twitter from using your phone’s GPS to tailor the ads it serves you.
See what data Twitter has collected about you
Twitter also has an area where you can see the demographic, geographic, and other ad targeting data it has collected about you. Go back to Advertisements preferences page in settings, scroll to the bottom and tap on View your Twitter data. Here you can view and edit Your profile but the best information can be found at Interests and Advertising Data tab. You can view and edit the interests that Twitter assumes about you and also ask to be emailed a list of advertisers with whom Twitter has shared your data.
You can also adjust your browser settings at improve your privacy in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge and Bravebut if you are concerned about your online privacy, this is the browser to use.
