In court documents released Wednesday, the FTC and the Department of Justice said Twitter violated a 2011 agreement with regulators in which the company said it would not sell information collected to protect user privacy.
In 2011, Twitter settled with the Federal Trade Commission, which accused the company of serious data breaches that allowed hackers to gain unauthorized administrative control of the platform. The order prohibited misrepresentation of how Twitter stores information such as email addresses and phone numbers obtained from users.
In the end, it turned out that Twitter prompted users to provide a phone number or email address as a second authorization factor and then used it to target ads without telling them or getting permission.
The story is still 2019, but now it has come to a federal court decision on a complaint by the US Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC. In addition to the fine, Twitter received a court order preventing it from continuing this practice, the company is required to notify users of the use of their data in this way, in addition, Twitter must provide the ability to use other methods of 2FA, without giving a phone or email. However, this has been around for a long time – you can use Authy or Google Authenticator for this.
We wrote earlier that Elon Musk proposed changing the approach to switching the algorithmic Twitter feed to a chronological one. The other day, he expressed the opinion that the current social network algorithms manipulate users. At the same time, the businessman is not sure whether the developers deliberately laid such a system in the basis of the platform or not.