Did you know? Twitter knows when you buy eggs, milk, and cheese in the REAL WORLD?

https://twitter.com/compgenius999/status/810245260349767680

Today I learned that Twitter tracking is as invasive, if not even WORSE than Facebook. How is that possible?

I was browsing through my Tweet's, and wanted to figure out what my most "liked" tweet was, so I went through Twitter Analytics, and I started to notice some odd things...

The first thing I saw is that they were fully aware of your gender, your primary interests, and your phone provider. Not that bad... But then, I noticed as I looked into the other tabs, such as Consumer Behaviour and Demographics, that they track much much more than you think.

It start's to get creepy. One of the things they track is your house price. That's right. They know exactly how much your house is worth. It's likely they figure out your primary address by the location you tweet from the most. To top it off, they take this location and run it against housing area sites, and figures out the average value in that area, if not for that exact house you're in. Now advertisers who want to sell you houses know exactly the kind-of price range you want...

The next strange part is the income. They know your household income. Somehow. I don't know if they figure this out based on what you post about on twitter, e.g "look at my new lambourghini", "lives in london" etc. - or if third parties, such as credit agencies attempt to corroborate your information, e.g. Joe Smith living in Birmingham who's age 23 could be matched perfectly.

Here's the weirdest part. They know exactly what you buy. In real life. Not just online. Seriously how many people buy Eggs and Milk online? How many people tweet about the eggs and milk they just bought? Very very few. The only way they could possibly know that my twitter audience likes to buy Eggs and Milk would either be:

1. They track your physical location 24/7, even when you're not tweeting. Using this data with store aisle maps, they can figure out that you spent 20 seconds in the Eggs aisle, and 25 seconds in the Milk aisle, likely meaning you were deciding on what milk and eggs to pick up.

2. They use similar third party data sharing to the speculated credit agency checks, and attempt to relate it to loyalty card data from stores such as Walmart, Target, and Tesco/Sainsbury's (UK).

This is followed by their "Automotive Purchase" section, which tells me the demographics of my audience's cars. It can tell me how many people own a car that's over 4 years old, how many purchased a car in the past 6 months, 6-12 months, 12-24 month etc.

These analytics opened my eyes to just how invasive Twitter's tracking and data sharing was. It's quite terrifying really, and makes me glad that I have never used the app, so I have avoided much of their location tracking.

This, is one of the many benefits of STEEM. It's unlikely that Steemit will ask for too many personal details, even in the future. Right now they require your phone and email, but luckily that can be bypassed with AnonSteem. There is also no location tracking on Steemit, so I can be sure that they aren't trying to watch me in the aisle of a supermarket as I attempt to purchase some cheese.

Remember to always be aware that these social networks are always trying to track you. To reduce their invasiveness, enable social blocking in your ad-blocker (I recommend µBlock Origin), and install anti-tracking extensions such as the EFF's Privacy Badger. To top it off, you can also use a VPN. Unlike TOR, VPN's often work fine, I've even made plenty of financial transactions without being flagged by my bank using PrivateInternetAccess and various other VPNs.

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