Twitter Knows Where You Live
Does the whole world really need to see where you are tweeting from? I usually don’t think about how much location data I share on Twitter because I don’t think anyone cares about 1) my tweets and 2) where I tweeted. However, a new Wired report made me rethink my approach. It turns out, according to their tweets are not too difficult to determine exactly where you live.
According to the Wired story, researchers at Illionis University and the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Technology have created a tool called LPAuditor, or Location Privacy Auditor, to take advantage of the fact that multiple users have shared their precise GPS coordinates. with Twitter for years – even if the more generic “name of the giant city you live in” was added to their tweets. According to the article :
For years, users who geotagged tweets from any location, even geographically widespread like New York, also automatically provided their exact GPS coordinates. Users will not see the coordinates displayed on Twitter. And their followers too. But the GPS information will still be included in the tweet metadata and available through the Twitter API.
Twitter did not change this policy in its apps until April 2015. Users now have to agree to share their exact location – and a very small percentage of people do that, according to a Twitter spokesperson. But the GPS data that people shared before the update remains available through the API to this day.
Uf. Fortunately, Twitter makes it incredibly easy to delete any location data you’ve sent it, and it might be time to use that feature. To find it, go to the Privacy & Security screen in your Twitter account settings. This parameter should be at the top of the page:
I would recommend disabling Location Tweet simply because you probably don’t need to share your exact location with anyone – be it your followers or the Twitter API. And once you’ve done that, hit the big Delete Location Information button to do it.
While it will certainly help you stay more private when others use the Twitter API to try and figure out where you are going, Twitter notes that deleting your location data may not be a reliable method:
“It is important to note that deleting location information on Twitter does not guarantee that the information will be removed from all copies of data in third-party applications or external search results. In addition, this setting does not delete locations sent through direct messages. “
That said, it’s better than nothing, especially since Twitter seems to have little or no interest in fixing this location data issue on your behalf. When Wired took to Twitter to ask why specific GPS coordinates are still stored in the company’s API, even after the company switched to a subscription model in April 2015, the company responded as follows:
“We didn’t think it wise to go back and unilaterally decide to change people’s tweets without their consent.”
Right. I bet fewer people care or even notice that Twitter removed the geotag from a 2014 tweet. Users would probably care a little more, however, if their address were circulated all over the internet due to old data that is still available through the Twitter API.