List of URLs checked by Twitter for its app targeting

This makes me ask questions that Twitter shouldn&#x27;t be making me ask.<p>I don&#x27;t presume to stop them from doing whatever they&#x27;re permitted to do, so instead I ask myself:<p>&quot;Should I uninstall the apps mentioned as their presence leaks information about me, or should I uninstall Twitter for spying on my device?&quot;<p>Initially I thought that I use Twitter, so that must be high value... I&#x27;ll delete the other apps. Then, looking through the list it occurs to me that as this expands I&#x27;d need to uninstall <i>everything</i> else <i>except</i> Twitter to render their spying useless.<p>Now I feel that the best solution is a very simple one: Uninstall Twitter and use the web version instead.<p>I guess that&#x27;s not the outcome they want to be steering people towards.<p>Edit: The web version feels like a very old iOS app. This isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing, it&#x27;s fast and snappy.

Third party Twitter clients.<p>Tweetbot: <a href="https://gist.github.com/genadyo/295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gistfile1-txt-L1026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;genadyo&#x2F;295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gi...</a><p>Twitterrific: <a href="https://gist.github.com/genadyo/295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gistfile1-txt-L2006" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;genadyo&#x2F;295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gi...</a><p>Twitterfon: <a href="https://gist.github.com/genadyo/295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gistfile1-txt-L1505" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;genadyo&#x2F;295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gi...</a><p>Echofon: <a href="https://gist.github.com/genadyo/295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gistfile1-txt-L217" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;genadyo&#x2F;295a5e8f0d743f57137f#file-gi...</a><p>Am sure there are others.

Under Android, it&#x27;s possible to get a list of all installed applications by querying the packageManager: <a href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/PackageManager.html#queryIntentActivities(android.content.Intent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;reference&#x2F;android&#x2F;content&#x2F;pm&#x2F;P...</a>, int), rather than &quot;brute-forcing&quot; known URL schemes. This doesn&#x27;t require any special permissions.

If you read the details closely of what Twitter is doing here, it&#x27;s even worse than I had imagined:<p>From their help center [<a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172069" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.twitter.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20172069</a>]<p><i>How will I know this feature is turned on for my account? We will notify you about this feature being turned on for your account by showing a prompt letting you know that to help tailor your experience, Twitter uses the apps on your device. Until you see this prompt, this setting is turned off and we are not collecting a list of your apps.</i><p>So, they collect the data first, and then they prompt the user telling them what they have done. This is the opposite of privacy friendly.<p><i>How do I turn this feature off and remove my data from Twitter?</i><p>Note carefully the overloaded meaning of the word Twitter here. Do they mean the Twitter app, or the Twitter service, or Twitter as a company? Grammatically and meaning-wise, the first one is the only one that makes sense. Which is very alarming...<p>Because it means, after they &quot;remove&quot; your data from the app, they still have your data. Or does it? It&#x27;s not completely clear, which is part of the problem. The help text reads one way (no worries, you can delete your data) on a quick reading, but a completely different way on a careful reading.<p><i>You can easily adjust the setting that allows Twitter to collect a list of apps on your mobile device. Once you turn off the setting, we will remove your app graph data from Twitter and stop future collection.</i><p>Again, one has to wonder what they mean by &quot;remove your app graph data from Twitter.&quot; Call me paranoid but to me this reads like weasel words and they still keep a copy of your data, just not on Twitter, whatever they mean by that.<p>So to recap, the really bad known thing here is they collect the data first, and ask permission later. The possibly really bad unknown thing is maybe they keep the data even after you think you are asking them to get rid of it, while trying to make it appear that they don&#x27;t.

What am I looking at?

I&#x27;m a bit out of the loop on corporate data gathering. Why is Twitter collecting this data?<p>This is a sincere question, from their point of view what exactly are they doing and why?

I am sorry for my ignorance, but can somebody explain what this list means? How are they checking for those URLS? Are they monitoring all URLs I visit in my device? Should I be concerned?

having worked for a company on the whitelist (and worked with Twitter directly for &quot;whitelisting&quot; scenarios), i would have to guess this is for proper deep linking integration.<p>that is, if Twitter links to &quot;App X&quot;, Twitter needs to know if it can open App X directly or if it needs to direct the user to some website for App X instead.<p>i&#x27;d blame Apple for making this a notorious pain in the ass before i blamed Twitter for trying to fix it.

Now I&#x27;m done with Twitter. Its a low value noise machine anyway.

Probably dumb question, but why is every app registering their own URL scheme? Is that an iOS requirement?

One wonders if I have a large quantity of ad bucks to spend, and I&#x27;m willing to sign a NDA, if I could &quot;target users who have installed X, Y, and Z competitors&#x27; apps?&quot; (ditto for FB)

Will Apple phase out URL schemes now that we have extensions ?<p>But the thing is that URL schemes are very convenient in some cases.<p>One possible solution could be that you have to include all the URLs your app intends to open in its plist file. So if you&#x27;re going to list hundreds then they can go ahead and reject those apps. But this wouldn&#x27;t provide perfect privacy.<p>So my guess is that URL schemes will be yanked soon and all developers will be forced to use extensions for inter-app communication.

I commented in one of the other threads, and said,<p>I&#x27;m really curious what the Apple AppStore review team has to say about this.

Twitter seems to honor &quot;Limit Ad Tracking&quot;. At least I don&#x27;t see the option and I have limit ad tracking turned on. If that is the case, then I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m very concerned.

Should I be flattered that two of my apps are on there?

Next thing you know, Apple limits the number of URLScheme checks any given app is able to do within a single session... should be interesting!

I read &quot;petrescuesaga&quot; as &quot;Petres Cuesaga&quot;, the possible name of a developer. A Google search proved my brain wrong :)

What are all those fb[0-9]+:&#x2F;&#x2F;-schemes?

Pretty interesting that it includes our Thermo app as well.

My Lenovo phone comes with integrated firewall out of factory... Just saying.

Has it been confirmed that these are being used for ad targeting? Or is this just a frenzy of indignation based on speculation?<p>[Update: OK, wow, yes I see, Twitter themselves announced the tracking: <a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172069" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.twitter.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20172069</a>]<p>There are legitimate uses for this information in an app, such as for when a user is given the chance to tweet about a high score from a game, for example, and the app URL for the game could be used to get them back into the game app after they finish in the Twitter app.<p>I&#x27;m not saying this is the case (I don&#x27;t know). It would be interesting to see whether all the apps in the list have some way that they interact with the Twitter app.