Your Twitter experience is now a bit less private. As its revenue faces headwinds, Twitter announced it is withdrawing a privacy setting that allowed users to control whether some of their data should be shared with third-party advertisers. The move, Twitter said in a notification sent to users on Wednesday, will help it “continue operating as a free service.”
Prior to this update, there was an option to “Share your data with Twitter’s business partners” which allowed you to opt-out of Twitter sharing information such as ads you saw or interacted with and your phone’s tracking identifier with advertisers. That is now enabled by default with no opt-out for anyone except for those who live in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association, and the United Kingdom.
“The control you have over what information Twitter shares with its business partners has changed. Specifically, your ability to control mobile app advertising measurements has been removed, but you can control whether to share some non-public data to improve Twitter’s marketing activities on other sites and apps. These changes, which help Twitter to continue operating as a free service, are reflected now in your settings,” Twitter wrote in the notification.
This, however, doesn’t mean Twitter is now actively compromising any of your personal information. Advertisers still don’t get access to data like your name, email, phone number, and username.
You can also still choose to keep your non-public data to yourself by toggling off the “Allow additional information sharing with business partners” option from Settings > Privacy & Safety > Personalization & Data. In addition, disabling this will make sure Twitter doesn’t hand out your non-public data to other tech advertising platforms like Google and Facebook — which Twitter said it now employs to market itself.
“We’re updating a data-sharing setting that relates to sharing additional information with business partners, specifically to measure the effectiveness of mobile app ads on Twitter. This is part of our ongoing work around transparency and control. We want to ensure that people understand the settings we provide, what they do, and how to use them,” a Twitter spokesperson told Engadget in a statement.
Incidentally, Twitter blamed its third-quarter earnings slump last year partly on flaws inside its mobile app advertising tech which, due to a bug, also inadvertently used users’ phone numbers and email addresses for ad targeting.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?