Twitter accepts of revealing specific locations details included with some of your tweets without your consent.
As the debate over the right to privacy rages on, a new report claims that Twitter is revealing specific locations details included with some of its users‘ tweets without his/her consent. And what is more surprising is that the social media giant — Twitter accepts the same and said that this happened because of a bug, which is now being fixed.
Several Twitter users last week complained about the issue. They said that the location that was added to their tweets weren’t their current ones. Instead, they said, the location that Twitter added to their tweets was either a place they have visited recently or searched for on Twitter. The issue went on to become really serious and that’s when Twitter decided to look into the matter and after inspection, the social media giant did acknowledge the issue and fixed it.
It was a bug, revealed Twitter. The micro-blogging site on Friday took to Twitter Support account to post, „We’ve discovered an issue for a small percentage of people who recently had location-sharing on, Tweeted from https://twitter.com, and tapped to add an emoji or GIF. In certain instances, a city-level location was also included in the Tweet.“ But, the problem has apparently been resolved now.
Also Read: Twitter starts testing Bookmarks, a feature that lets you save tweets for later
Twitter now says that it has removed the locations from tweets that were affected by the bug and has also reached out to such accounts users via email (if it’s provided to them). This report comes from Inverse.com.
A similar incident happened last week when Google confirmed of gathering location data from Android smartphones even when the location services were turned off and there was no SIM card on the device. This was first reported by Quartz. However, after all the accuses, Google said that the location information was never used or stored and that they are now planning to put an end to this practice by the end of this month. Commenting on the incident, a Google spokesperson said — „In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery. However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.“
Well, as of now, Google has been summoned by regulators in South Korea where the search giant is being questioned about the data collection issue without the user’s consent.
With inputs from IANS
