Twitter is making it clear just how much of your data it will share with third parties

Sep 9, 2014 13:17 GMT  ·  By

Twitter is paving the way to its new e-commerce plans with an update to its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

In an email the company is sending out to users, Twitter doesn’t hide behind the finger and states outright that the new changes were made to reflect the new features they’ve been testing in the United States, such as the “buy” button that allows users to purchase merchandise from some of the popular companies and artists on Twitter.

“The Terms of Service update introduces terms covering the use of our commerce offerings. The new terms also describe your relationship with merchandise sellers, including their responsibility for order fulfillment, shipping and returns,” Twitter states about the changes.

As the company points out, the Privacy Policy was updated too to include added protections for the new information that users may have to provide, such as the credit card number and shipping address. Furthermore, there should also be some provisions relating to commerce services that they’ll be testing in the future, like special offers you can redeem at select stores with the help of a credit card.

The Privacy Policy gets an update, too

Therefore, the new Privacy Policy clarifies a few things, such as the fact that the service may request additional account information to help prevent spam, fraud or abuse. It explains that all the data about the cards used for purchase and the shipping address are encrypted and stored at Twitter so they can be used at a later date. If one does not trust Twitter, the data can be removed at any time.

Twitter also uses registered card data to verify eligibility for card-linked services and may end up using this to limit the number of offers available to an individual and to keep track of their offers.

User data may also end up in the possession of the seller, commerce provider or marketplace, including name, email address, shipping address and all other details related to the payment bit of the process, but all this makes sense since it applies to Twitter users who make purchases on the platform.

Twitter will also share data with its corporate affiliates, although it promises to respect privacy policies. For instance, it will let companies know if you use your Twitter credentials to log into Vine, or to provide better ads through MoPub.

Overall, however, the new policy Twitter is bringing in mentions a lot of cases where it will hand over user data to third parties, which is a bit daunting.