Do X(Twitter) spy on what I'm doing on my phone?
Do X(Twitter) spy on what I'm doing on my phone?
A few minutes ago, I'm just reading the news from the RSS feeder app called Feeder and then suddenly I got a notification from x from Linux handbook which I was seeing in the feeder app. How?
I'm gonna start by saying Twitter doesn't respect your privacy, this we all should know. However, I don't think this is what you think.
You're reading an RSS feed that Linux Handbook publishes to. They published something and likely published it elsewhere at the same (or similar) times. It shows up in your feed, and you're reading it. At the same time, their post on Twitter has propagated to the point where followers are being notified and the algorithm is sending notifications to people that might be interested in it. You get a notification from Twitter. Panik
It's just a coincidence, and being skeptical has rotted your brain. Sometimes shit do just be like that. Everyone in privacy oriented communities has had this happen at some point, and because of how we think we end up feeling like it's malicious.
Hanlon's razor, but with coincidence instead of stupidity.
Exactly. We are wired to see patterns and coincidences as being outliers, so mix that with a little brain worms and paranoia and boom
Yes.
A rule of thumb: any and all proprietary applications spy on you, this goes doubly so for the big social corps. There is an epidemic of spyware and it's all being sold to you as a benefit.
Short answer : Yes.
Long answer : Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.
I'm surprised people still use Twitter
Isn't it called haixs now? (the h is silent)
It probably does unless you have some adblock and cookie deleter in the browser you are using. AndroidWebView is a browser too.
Also, in the topic, check out The Power of Habit. From the description it doesn't look like it, but the second half neatly shows that there are many ways to spy on you from even before smartphones existed and easier than reading your screen or recording conversations
They do. Some of the bigger apps have their own zero day exploits that they use to get into things. Facebook is typically the worst, primarily because they bypass the app stores and make deals directly with manufacturers to install system apps.
Incidentally, in Android phones, WhatsApp was the primary vector for the NSA's Pegasus toolkit. They would send a WhatsApp call, then with no response from the user gain full access to the phone. How did WhatsApp give them access to the phone, if WhatsApp itself didn't have access? With iPhones, Pegasus targeted iMessages, so it makes more sense that they'd find a way in there.
@Harry_h0udini @privacy a guess: only in the same way every other app does - they ALL buy ads from these ad providers, which ALL track the contexts where their ads appear and link them to your profile and then serve ads related to your profile
Well, do you follow them? It could be that you searched for something related to Linux on Twitter at some point. In general, apps can't see your activity in other apps. Still, Twitter does not respect their users' privacy.
We have known for more than a decade now that training machine learning models on huge user data sets allows to predict a lot of things with decent accuracy.
Twitter has been gathering a lot of data on all of its user, it is expected them to be able to predict interests like (and much more) this if you use their service.
No need to spy on your smartphone beside what you submit willingly https://hbr.org/2012/09/use-big-data-to-predict-your-c
If you’re using actual apps for things like Twitter, the data should be siloed. If you’re using a web browser, then things like ad tracking cookies would be accessible between sites/pages.
Yes
Its most probably not that X has access to your phone. I believe since some older version of android, all apps are sandboxed and there are rules to what they have access to (Android Run Time, SELinux). How this works IMHO is you are using a normie (google) android phone. You have an advertising ID assigned to it (you can find it in the setting under Privacy/Marketing), which is visible to apps, therefore the Feeder app sees it and sells the data of what you are looking at tied to the ID, someone buying it for a campaign on an exchange and uses it for marketing on X, which shows it to you based on that same advertising ID because it can see it also. To avoid 95% of tracking like this, use a degoogled android phone. In case you use iPhone, there is nothing you can do.
On Android (13) you can delete the advertising ID under Security & Privacy > More privacy settings > Ads
Cool, they really are trying to get rid of the middlemen.
Ngl that is sus. I would hope its a coincidence but if your already using feeder I would go to the settings and disallow X to run in the background.
I wonder if this could be involved with it too? https://blog.hidemyass.com/en/twitter-is-now-spying-on-the-other-apps-you-download-on-your-phone
I have not used Twitter so that's my extent.