I've always figured that I was excessively paranoid in always turning off location data on every device where I access Twitter. Turns out, there may have been a point to it.
Prior to 2015, even if you only geo-tagged yourself as being in a large geographical area, such as a city, Twitter would embed your GPS coordinates in the metadata of the tweet. This wasn't visible to most users, but anyone who uses the Twitter API can get at that metadata. And, of course, as has been long known with regard to social media, when you've got that much data (and metadata), the aggregation effect kicks in and you can find out all kinds of things. Turns out, researchers have been able to identify "anonymous" accounts simply by using this location metadata and a few inferences.
Yes, and probably has associated any relationships you have as well, and who you are liaising with too.
Take Apps, as well, how many Apps do you download and have sufficient confidence to use and many of them actually require you to turn on the location information as well. E,g. Weather and the majority of us agree to it.
Regards
Caute_cautim
Location information firmly disable and advertising limited. Thanks
@rslade wrote:I've always figured that I was excessively paranoid in always turning off location data on every device where I access Twitter. Turns out, there may have been a point to it.
Prior to 2015, even if you only geo-tagged yourself as being in a large geographical area, such as a city, Twitter would embed your GPS coordinates in the metadata of the tweet. This wasn't visible to most users, but anyone who uses the Twitter API can get at that metadata. And, of course, as has been long known with regard to social media, when you've got that much data (and metadata), the aggregation effect kicks in and you can find out all kinds of things. Turns out, researchers have been able to identify "anonymous" accounts simply by using this location metadata and a few inferences.