How It Works

Last Updated: 12 August

Our use of cookies and similar technologies

Our services use cookies and other similar technologies, such as pixels or local storage, to help provide you with a better, faster, and safer experience. Here are some of the ways that our services, including our various websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, and ads, use these technologies: to log you into Twitter and Periscope, save your preferences, personalize the content you see, protect against spam and abuse, and show you more relevant ads.

Below we explain how Twitter, our partners, and other third parties use these technologies, your privacy settings, and the other options you have.

What are cookies, pixels, and local storage?

Cookies are small files that websites place on your computer as you browse the web. Like many websites, Twitter, Periscope, and our other services use cookies to discover how people are using our services and to make them work better.

A pixel is a small amount of code on a web page or in an email notification. As many services do, we use pixels to learn whether you’ve interacted with certain web or email content. This helps us measure and improve our services and personalize your experience.

Local storage is an industry-standard technology that allows a website or application to store information locally on your computer or mobile device. We use local storage to customize what we show you based on your past interactions with our services.

Why do our services use these technologies?

Our services use these technologies to deliver, measure, and improve our services in various ways. These uses generally fall into one of the following categories:

  • Authentication and security:

    • To log you into Twitter and Periscope.
    • To protect your security.
    • To let you to view content with limited distribution.
    • To help us detect and fight spam, abuse, and other activities that violate the Twitter Rules and the Periscope Community Guidelines.
    • For example, these technologies help authenticate your access to Twitter and Periscope and prevent unauthorized parties from accessing your account. They also let us show you appropriate content through our services.

  • Preferences:

    • To remember information about your browser and your preferences.
    • For example, cookies help us remember your preferred language or the country that you are in. We can then provide you with Twitter and Periscope content in your preferred language without having to ask you each time you visit Twitter or Periscope. On Twitter, we can also customize content based on your country, such as showing you what topics are trending near you, or to withhold certain content based on applicable local laws. Learn more about trends and country withheld content.

Where are these technologies used?

We (along with third parties) use these technologies on our websites, applications, and services and on other websites, applications, and services that have integrated our services, including third-party properties that incorporate our advertising technology. This includes our ad partners’ websites and sites that use our embeds, including embedded timelines. Third parties may also use these technologies, for example, when you click on links from our websites or applications, view or interact with third-party content from within our services, or visit third-party websites that incorporate our advertising technology.

What are my privacy options?

We are committed to offering you meaningful privacy choices. You have a number of options to control or limit how we, our partners, and other third parties use cookies:

  • To control whether Twitter stores information about other websites where you’ve seen Twitter content, adjust the Track where you see Twitter content across the web setting in your Personalization and data settings. If you have this setting turned off or are in the European Union or EFTA States, Twitter will not store or use such web page visits to improve your experience in the future. If we’ve previously stored your web browsing history, your experience may continue to be personalized based on information already inferred from that history.

  • If you do not want Twitter to show you interest-based ads on and off of Twitter, there are several ways to disable this feature:

    • Using your Twitter settings, visit the Personalization and data settings and adjust the setting Personalize ads.
    • On iOS version 13 and earlier only, if you do not want Twitter to show you interest-based ads in Twitter for iOS on your current mobile device, enable the Limit Ad Tracking setting in your iOS phone’s settings (precise directions may be different on different iOS versions).
    • On Android, if you do not want Twitter to show you interest-based ads in Twitter for Android on your current mobile device, enable Opt out of Ads Personalization in your Android phone’s settings (precise directions and name of the setting may be different on different Android versions and OEM Android variants).
  • To control cookies, you can modify your settings in most web browsers to accept or deny cookies or to request your permission each time a site attempts to set a cookie. Although cookies are not required for some parts of our services, Twitter and Periscope may not work properly if you disablecookies entirely. For example, you cannot log into twitter.com or pscp.tv if you've turned off all cookie use.

Note: Please confirm that you are logged in if you want to view or change the web settings for your Twitter account. Changing your Twitter settings in your web browser when you are logged out will only affect behavior on that browser while you are not logged in to Twitter. Learn more about how to access your Personalization and data settings, including in your Twitter mobile app.