Twitter Privacy Settings — A Beginner’s Guide to Effectively Manage their Content
With any Social Media Platform comes a plethora of privacy settings one must manage before creating and sharing their content/thoughts. These privacy settings are in place so that users have the option to limit who sees what they are posting and allows users to control the content that is being shown to them.
In this Blogpost, I will go through Twitter’s Privacy and Safety settings to display what one should be wary about when managing these settings. Remember that a lot of these settings are made to my personal preferences and there is always the option to be more public/private based on your own preferences.
Create Log-in Requests and Back-up Codes
This is the most vital privacy setting that Twitter offers as it ensures that whenever anyone tries to log into your Twitter account, they must go through a secondary step to ensure their access. This protects your account as you should be the only one that has access to it and whenever any unwanted person tries to log into your account, you receive a notification that alerts you to their access attempts.
Removing Tweet Locations
Location information is risky information to provide on Twitter as every tweet will be stamped with your location, potentially leaving this information open for anyone to see. This is an issue because you don’t know exactly who is being provided this information and it may be a risk to your own privacy and safety.
Monitor Twitter Personalization/Promoted Content
These options allow for the user to control the content that is being shown to them. Personalization is a concern for your privacy as it allows Twitter to cater towards your own preferences based on the websites that you previously viewed. This becomes an issue because Twitter becomes too knowledgeable about your interests and tries to cater to exactly what you want, potentially limiting your access to new/controversial topics.
Controlling the promoted content is a privacy concern that also ties into personalization. By allowing Twitter to tailor ads to your preferences, you allow them to track what products/services they believe is right for you. This could be an issue because everything that you see will be funneled by Twitter as they have access to what you like and will cater ads towards what they believe you are interested in.
Manage Discoverability Options
Discovery options help determine how people can find your account and who you are opening your account to. Within my personalized settings, I allowed people to discover my account through my phone number and not my email address because I am a lot more liberal with giving away my email address than my phone number. This ensures that only people that I can trust have easy access to find my account as opposed to people who simply have my email address.
