Twitter apologized to its users last May 14 in a blog post after it admitted that it had inadvertently shared user location data with its advertising partner. Twitter said that the bug the caused the data collection has been fixed.
Trevor Mogg added some details about the Twitter data leak in this article published in Digital Trends:
The company declined to reveal how many people had been affected, and how long it had been collecting the data. The name of the partner was also withheld. It did, however, offer some details on the nature of the bug, as well as information on which users may have had their location data exposed.
“Specifically, if you used more than one account on Twitter for iOS and opted into using the precise location feature in one account, we may have accidentally collected location data when you were using any other account(s) on that same device for which you had not turned on the precise location feature,” the company wrote in a post.
Twitter said it shared the location data with an advertising partner after it failed to remove it from information sent to that partner for the purposes of real-time bidding, a process where businesses pay for ad space based on a user’s location at any given time.
It said the removal of the location data “did not happen as planned,” although it did manage to implement measures that obscured the shared data so that the location was no more precise than an area of five square kilometers.
In other words, the location data wasn’t specific enough to reveal a specific address, or to map exact movements. In a bid to further reassure its community, Twitter said the partner that received the data did not have access to Twitter names or other information linked to a profile. According to Twitter, the shared location data was only held for a short time by the partner before being deleted as part of its normal routine.
