BENGALURU: Reuters reported that Twitter is about to monitor third party apps that you download to your mobile phone and use that data to help sell advertising.
According to social media company, it’s about making a "more personal Twitter experience for you" so that it can deliver "tailored content that you might be interested in.”
As a part of this effort, Twitter will only collect the list of names of apps you install through a feature called app graph "app graph" data. This instills a feeling of insecurity among the users for very obvious reasons. The users are worried about this new feature in spite of the post which shows how to turn off the app feature.
It is presumed by Reuters that this will be able to start finding similarities between people who download similar apps. This would perhaps help Twitter sell ads to app developers keen to get more downloads which Facebook has already been doing effectively.
For instance, if a user intends to download an app like Evernote, it implies that he might as well be interested in apps similar to Evernote. This will help Twitter understand the users psyche and serve them better by giving the targeted data. This will bolster the data that Twitter can glean from the content of people's tweets and the accounts that people follow.
The content that Twitter refers is of course the advertisements on which the company builds its revenue. Like Google and Facebook, Twitter allows people to use its services for free in exchange for sending them targeted advertisements. Twitter seems to follow the footsteps of Facebook, however one can opt out of this feature if they deem it unnecessary.
In Twitter's announcement about the new feature, it focuses on improvements to the content that you will see, including showing who to follow based on their similar interests, and to add content to your timeline from accounts you don’t already follow that Twitter thinks you might find interesting.
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