14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has changed its privacy rules and, along with them, decided to abandon Do Not Track (DNT), the website privacy policy, despite being among the first companies to adopt it.
In short, Twitter no longer promises to protect people from being tracked as they browse the Internet.
Back when Do Not Track was created, it seemed like the best idea. All you had to do was enable DNT on your browser and hope that at least some of the websites you were visiting got that signal from your browser and ignored all other websites you visited by not placing or reading advertising cookies on your device.
This initiative was supposed to protect people's online privacy by not collecting and storing any information about them without their explicit permission.
That was back in 2012 and it failed from the get-go. Advertisers, for their part, have their own interpretation of the rules. While they stopped serving targeted ads based on people's browsing history, they still collected and stored and monetized that very data.
Over the years, more and more sites decided to drop support for the DNT initiative, although some continued to respect it. Twitter was one of the latter, up until a day ago when its policies changed. The company probably realized this was a lost battle.
DNT makes an exit, other privacy rules make an appearance
"Twitter has discontinued support of the Do Not Track browser preference. While we had hoped that our support for Do Not Track would spur industry adoption, an industry-standard approach to Do Not Track did not materialize. We now offer more granular privacy controls," the company said in a statement.
According to its new privacy rules, Twitter is extending how long its tracking cookies are active, going from 10 days to 30 days beginning on June 18. The same rules allow users to switch off Twitter ad personalization and disable geolocation and data sharing with third parties. That seems to be a more helpful approach than DNT.