Tell Twitter Your Birthday to Get Some Balloons (Or Not)
Micro-blogging and social networking site Twitter, recently announced the introduction a new feature: the option to show your birthday on your Twitter profile. If you tell Twitter your birthday, it will celebrate it by displaying some balloons on your profile. Like this.
Here’s what you have to do to add your birthday to your Twitter profile:
“Your birth date is a completely optional part of your profile and you have full control over who can see it. The visibility setting for your birth year is separate from the setting for your birth month and day, giving you the flexibility to share as much (or as little) as you want,” said Ricardo Castro, Product Manager with Twitter.
Why does Twitter want to know your birthday? To know how old you are, obviously! But why does Twitter want to know how old you are? So they can sell it to advertisers. It’s clearly spelled out in the fine print.
Twitter already knows your location, it can analyze your tweets to identify your interests and to see how you feel about various topics, and it’s now asking for your age. And if you give it to them, they’ll be able to give it to advertisers who will use it for targeted promotions.
“Whether you think that's a reasonable trade-off for a few animated balloons is a question only you can answer. Certainly more and more people are becoming concerned about the use of "big data", and just how much technology companies are learning about our private lives,” commented Graham Cluley, public speaker and independent computer security analyst.
Here’s what you have to do to add your birthday to your Twitter profile:
- Sign into your account on Twitter.com and select the Edit Profile option.
- Use the dropdown to enter a month, day, and year.
- Choose who can see your birth year. Make it public, set it so only your followers can see it, and so on (see image below).
“Your birth date is a completely optional part of your profile and you have full control over who can see it. The visibility setting for your birth year is separate from the setting for your birth month and day, giving you the flexibility to share as much (or as little) as you want,” said Ricardo Castro, Product Manager with Twitter.
Why does Twitter want to know your birthday? To know how old you are, obviously! But why does Twitter want to know how old you are? So they can sell it to advertisers. It’s clearly spelled out in the fine print.
Twitter already knows your location, it can analyze your tweets to identify your interests and to see how you feel about various topics, and it’s now asking for your age. And if you give it to them, they’ll be able to give it to advertisers who will use it for targeted promotions.
“Whether you think that's a reasonable trade-off for a few animated balloons is a question only you can answer. Certainly more and more people are becoming concerned about the use of "big data", and just how much technology companies are learning about our private lives,” commented Graham Cluley, public speaker and independent computer security analyst.
