According to the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter will pay $150 million after the company reportedly breached a previous ruling involving unauthorized access to users’ personal information.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on behalf of the FTC stating that Twitter urged users to enter an email address or phone number for multi-factor authentication, which was designed to improve account security, but that the firm ultimately sold the information to marketers to target adverts.
Twitter’s data collection operation lasted from May 2013 to September 2019 and resulted in the personal information of over 140 million users being shared. The FTC alleges it was in the “multi-millions” when it comes to how much money the platform made by sharing such information.
According to The Hill, Twitter apologized in 2019 for sharing user data for ad targeting, stating that it did it “inadvertently.” Following the FTC settlement, Twitter’s chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran, reviewed the “inadvertent” idea, saying, “email addresses and phone numbers provided for account security purposes may have been used for advertising inadvertently.”
In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Twitter, alleging that the firm falsely claimed that users were the only ones who could see their tweets and that direct messages were only visible to the receiver. On many times, it was discovered that users’ personal information was being accessed without their consent, and Twitter was compelled to accede to an injunction the following year that said that if such a breach occurred again, Twitter would face a hefty financial penalty.
Following Twitter’s recent privacy breach, a number of additional safeguards were adopted, including informing users about illegal use of their personal information, allowing multi-factor verification that does not need collecting phone numbers, and more.