The millions of tweet buttons will keep track of any site you go to

May 18, 2012 09:28 GMT  ·  By
Twitter will know about any site you visit, as long as it has a tweet button
   Twitter will know about any site you visit, as long as it has a tweet button

Twitter has started experimenting with customizing follow suggestions based on your interests. That sounds like a good idea, it's getting harder and harder to find people to follow on Twitter and the problem is bigger for new users.

Twitter suggests accounts you may want to follow when you first sign up, based on what's popular on the entire site, and also suggests new accounts from time to time based on who your friends follow.

The system works, but it gets better as you add more followers and it's the worst for new users, which are exactly the users Twitter wants to hang on to the most.

Twitter has a solution to the problem, suggestions based on your interests meaning Twitter will suggest people to follow based on the things you like or find interesting. But how would Twitter know what you like?

Well, easy, Twitter can simply track the sites you visit, look at other people that visit the sites and figure out what you have in common and the people to suggest. That begs the next question, how can Twitter follow you everywhere?

Well, again the answer is simple, it's got millions of tweet buttons scattered across millions of sites. And every time you visit one of these sites, you access Twitter's API and your visit is logged.

You'd expect this kind of thing from Facebook, which does indeed track you across any site that uses a Like button or, even better, Facebook login, but less so from Twitter.

Suggestions are just the first step, for Twitter to perfect the system and start gathering data. Once it's going full Steam, it's going to be able to use this data for all sorts of things. Can you guess the first thing it's going to use it for though? Why yes, targeted advertising of course, because even Twitter has to "eat."

Still, it's not as bad as it could have been. Twitter only stores the URLs you visit for 10 days and doesn't share them with anyone. Instead the data is used to create your profile, which is then used for suggestions (now) and may be used for other things later.

What's more, Twitter will respect Do Not Track so, if you use Firefox or any other browser with similar privacy settings, Twitter will not track you in any way. The move does explain why Twitter started supporting Do Not Track in the first place, as it didn't really track anything until now.