Twitter allows users to configure their privacy settings according to their preferences. The most impactful settings with regard to data sharing and privacy are those concerning privating an account and tailoring advertisements to your liking. Privating your account will allow you to restrict the access of your tweets to those who follow you. Additionally, you may restrict the ability of users to direct message (DM) your account. You are able to limit collection of data for advertisement or marketing purposes in your settings as well.
Information on Twitter is shared publicly to all users, privately to selected users, and through cookies to the company directly. Publicly, information such as location, name, device, and username can be shared at the discretion of the user. Privately, information can be shared in teh form of DMs from one user to others. Informaiton is shared directly with the company regardless of user settings through cookies, such as IP address or device type. Additionally, users can choose to share information such as name, email, phone number, and location with the company. Information shared for the purposes of marketing that is compiled implicitly through your use of the platform, i.e. what language you speak and your interests are collected but the process for determining interests is not described in full detail by the company. Twitter uses this data to determine which advertisements to target users with, and the targeting of ads can be restricted in your settings. However, you can request to acceess all compiled data Twitter has on your specific account.
Access the information on your account by:
The information that is present on your Twitter account may be accesible to search engines if your account is public. To mitigate this, make your account private, restricting access to our tweets from the search engine and the public in general.
Deactivate your twitter account by:
From here, you can deactivate your account, which will remove your name, username, and profile from the website. However, this information may persist on search engines despite being removed from the platform. Additionally, the information that Twitter has collected from your account will not be deeleted for 30 days following deactivation of your account. Twitter allows users to reactivate their accounts for 30 days after deactivation, and the data persists to allow users to do so. Despite this, users will not be able to access their Twitter data during these 30 days, so make sure to download user data before deactivating your account.
Your account will be more secure if it is private. This is because it restricts public access of your account, thus restricting search engines from accessing your account. To remove your information from search engines, you must petition the platform to remove the query result. However, it may be tedious and difficult to acquire all results including your account across all search engines, making it incredibly difficult to ensure account information after deactivation is actually removed from public access. Therefore, to avoid all this, make your account private. Additionally, do not allow Twitter to tailor ads according to your interests, as this encourages the site to gather more data on your usage to determine traits about you as a user. Finally, be conscious of the information you willingly provide to the platform. Make sure to configure features such as Photo Tagging, Discoverability, Location, and Third-Party Access.