Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them.<p>Some might say, &quot;Stop using twitter&quot;, but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments, and other small public interests that use their Facebook page as a sole means of announcements. They shouldn&#x27;t be - but it doesn&#x27;t change the fact that they are. The Ad industry needs strong and enforceable regulation, and quickly.

&quot;We are committed to providing you meaningful privacy choices&quot; -&gt; &quot;We are committed to selling your data if you let us&quot;<p>I hate this sort of pseudo-friendly weasel-wording that&#x27;s getting increasingly popular these days.

So there are essentially remnants of our browsing history linked to our devices shared among numerous ad companies.<p>They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads.<p>Twitter is at it. We&#x27;ve experienced the same behavior from Google &amp; God knows Facebook is at it too.<p>I&#x27;ve even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locally running Alexa only to see ads relating to our specific conversation 10 minutes later on the web.<p>Can anybody think of a technological approach to flagging this behavior?

Reminds me of an ex-Amazon ad exec, Kivin Varghese, &#x27;fessing up about the wrongs in the business dealings there and eventually getting the boot [0]. The only difference is that perhaps Twitter, as a company, is &#x27;fessing up and not any individual working against the interests of a company.<p>Seems like all sides of the ad-industry is a giant cess pool, and no one&#x27;s playing it fair.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8600716" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8600716</a>

There&#x27;s a way to nearly eliminate all Twitter ads from your feeds. Whenever you see one tap &#x2F; click the drop down arrow on the top right of it and select &quot;I don&#x27;t like this ad.&quot;<p>After you do it enough Twitter will drastically reduce the volume of ads it shows you. I see one every day or two and it&#x27;s usually Twitter&#x27;s &quot;you&#x27;ve been selected to fill out a survey&quot; ad.

For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the net, at least regarding the Big Players.<p>Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon &amp; co)...? ;-)

With the way the internet works and the tech they have built, it&#x27;s harder not to collect stuff. All of these companies have all sorts of stuff they shouldn&#x27;t, and I wouldn&#x27;t trust anything they say about opting out.

&quot;Confesses&quot;? I&#x27;m not a fan of everything Twitter does, but this headline is so biased. I&#x27;m actually angry now. Twitter is &quot;disclosing&quot; these on their own, afaik, and I take that as a morally good thing. Also, it&#x27;s a bug, not intended behavior in the first place. So if I understand this whole thing correctly, they never had to tell anyone they fixed these bugs, but they did anyway and people are still writing articles trying to drum up anger at Twitter for it. <i>Please.</i>

GDPR is a huge win for user privacy. All these have been going on and getting worse for years and finally getting surfaced.

they need to asked to shut up with pi-holes !

Regulation is not the answer. GDPR has not done much good. A way to pay for content without relying on ads is the only way

&gt; &#x27;fesses up<p>Can we have proper English at least in the HN submission titles? I know that this is a direct quotation of the original, but &quot;confesses&quot; is much clearer and more readable than the original slang term.

Here&#x27;s an idea. Stop using twitter.