On Monday, Twitter disclosed a privacy bug that gathered an account’s location information on iOS devices, regardless of whether it didn’t have its exact location tracking feature turned on. The social network was additionally imparting that location data with a promoting partner, the company said in an announcement.
The bug influenced you on the off chance that you had more than one Twitter account logged in on its iOS app and had the exact location feature empowered. In the event that you had it empowered on one account on the app, the bug would likewise trigger it for all the various accounts logged in on that device, Twitter said.
“We have fixed this issue and are endeavoring to ensure it does not occur once more,” Twitter said in its statement. “We have additionally communicated with the general public whose accounts were affected to let them know the bug has been fixed.”
Twitter didn’t react to a request for input on to what extent the bug had existed, and what number of people were affected by this problem. That data was sent to advertisers for a procedure called “real-time bidding,” where sponsors pay for space based on people’s location. Twitter said it expected to remove location data from what it sent to its advertising partners, yet failed to do so.
As an additional security measure, however, it did obscure that data so that it wasn’t “more exact than zip code or city,” which implies that it wasn’t presented as an address or exact developments. There additionally were not Twitter handles or one of the kind IDs involved with the bug, Twitter said. The social network said its partners just had that data for a brief period, and it was erased. Twitter didn’t remark on how long that timespan was.
As our sister site ZDNet points out, this is the fourth bug that Twitter has revealed in the previous year. In January, Twitter declared a bug that exposed Android users’ protected tweets since 2014. In September, Twitter disclosed a bug that sent people’s immediate message to designers who weren’t supposed to get it. And last May, Twitter cautioned its 330 million users there was a bug that put passwords in plain content in an internal log.
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“We’re very sorry this occurred. We perceive and appreciate the trust you place in us and are focused on earning that trust every day,” Twitter said in its Monday statement.