Twitter Knows Where You Live 

Twitter Knows Where You Live 

Does the entire world really need to see where you’re tweeting from? I usually don’t think about how much location data I’m sharing on Twitter, because I don’t think anybody cares about my 1) tweets and 2) where I tweet. However, a new report from Wired has made me rethink my approach. As it turns out, it’s not that difficult to pinpoint exactly where you live via your tweets.

As Wired’s story goes, a researchers from the University of Illionis and Greece’s Foundation for Research and Technology created a tool called “LPAuditor,” or “Location Privacy Auditor,” to exploit the fact that a number of users had been sharing their precise GPS coordinates with Twitter for years—even if their tweets had a more generic “name of the giant city in which you live” appended to them. According to the article:

For years, users who chose to geotag tweets with any location, even something as geographically broad as “New York City,” also automatically gave their precise GPS coordinates. Users wouldn’t see the coordinates displayed on Twitter. Nor would their followers. But the GPS information would still be included in the tweet’s metadata and accessible through Twitter’s API.

Twitter didn’t change this policy across its apps until April of 2015. Now, users must opt-in to share their precise location—and, according to a Twitter spokesperson, a very small percentage of people do. But the GPS data people shared before the update remains available through the API to this day.

Oof. Thankfully, Twitter makes it incredibly easy to delete any location data you’ve sent it, and maybe it’s time to give that feature a whirl. To find it, go visit the “Privacy and safety” screen on your Twitter account settings. This setting should be close to the top of the page:

I’d recommend turning off “Tweet with a location,” simply because you probably don’t need to be sharing your precise location with anyone—be it your followers or to Twitter’s API. And once you’ve done that, click on the big “Delete location information” button to do just that.

While this will certainly help you stay more private when others use the Twitter API to try to pinpoint where you go, Twitter notes that deleting your location data might not be a foolproof method:

“It is important to note that deleting location information on Twitter does not guarantee the information will be removed from all copies of the data on third-party applications or in external search results. Additionally, this setting will not remove locations shared through Direct Messages.”

Still, it’s better than nothing, especially since Twitter seems to have little to no interest in patching up this location data problem on your behalf. When Wired contact Twitter to ask why specific GPS coordinates still persist in the company’s API, even after the company switched to an opt-in model in April of 2015, this was the company’s response:

“We didn’t feel it would be appropriate for us to go back and unilaterally make the decision to change people’s tweets without their consent.”

Right. I wager fewer people care, or would even notice, that Twitter has removed the geotag on a tweet from 2014. Users would probably care a bit more, however, if their address was splashed all over the web because of old data that’s still available via Twitter’s API.


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