Have Twitter installed on your smartphone? Then Twitter has probably installed all your contacts on its servers.
Don't have an smartphone? Then Twitter still probably has your information buried somewhere in its server farm.
It's all allowed, no rules are being broken and we're the ones who consent to it -- though perhaps unknowingly.
Turns out that when you click to have the Twitter app scan your address book to "Find Friends" who are also on Twitter, the software collects your contacts' information and stores it for 18 months, according to the Los Angeles Times and verified by Twitter.
So even if you're not on Twitter, that means if a friend of yours syncs their contacts with Twitter -- boom -- your phone number, email address or whatever other info that friend has stored is shipped out.
And while it's not like many of us actually read the fine print in all those privacy policies we quickly 'Accept' to just move on already, even if you did read the one for Twitter's mobile app, you may still be unaware of this contacts slurp.
It says, transmitted "Log Data may include information such as your IP address, browser type, the referring domain, pages visited, your mobile carrier, device and application IDs, and search terms."
"If you really care about your privacy you may find this very upsetting," says HLN personal finance anchor Jennifer Westhoven. "Because in a way, there's almost nothing you can do to control whether Twitter gets your information."
She adds, "Even if you don't even have a Twitter account."
A company spokeswoman told the L.A. Times they'll start being more open about the process. "We want to be clear and transparent in our communications with users ... in our next app updates, which are coming soon, we are updating the language associated with Find Friends -- to be more explicit. In place of 'Scan your contacts,' we will use "Upload your contacts" and "Import your contacts."
So that's one consumer-friendly solution. Another? As Westhoven suggests, maybe just ask your pals to save your info under a fake or misspelled name.
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