Twitter issued an apology today. The text of it is reproduced below, in full. As background or context, you may wish to read this post about the FTC’s actions.
We may have asked for your phone number or email address to secure or authenticate your account (for example, for two-factor authentication). As we told you in October 2019, we may have used these phone numbers or email addresses to deliver tailored advertising to you on Twitter until September 2019. On June 6, 2022, we entered into a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission to resolve this issue.
As of September 17, 2019, we are no longer using phone numbers or email addresses collected for safety or security purposes for advertising. We never disclosed or shared your phone number or email address with advertisers. There is no action that you need to take regarding this issue.
You have a number of options to control your privacy and security when you use Twitter:
- Control your privacy settings. You can find out more about your privacy settings on Twitter, including how to enable or disable personalized ads, by visiting https://myprivacy.twitter.com.
- Review your multi-factor authentication settings. By requiring both a password and a secondary code or security key to access your account, multi-factor authentication can help keep your account safe. You can use an authentication app, a security key, or a phone number for multi-factor authentication. (And if you provide us a phone number for multi-factor authentication, it will not be used for advertising purposes without your consent.) You can learn about multi-factor authentication settings by visiting https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/two-factor-authentication.
For more details about how we protect the information you share with us and how we use that data, we encourage you to visit the Twitter Privacy Center.
We are very sorry this happened. If you have questions or comments about this notice or what we do to protect your information moving forward, you may contact Twitter’s Office of Data Protection through this form.
Source: Twitter