Twitter is attempting to improve its targeting by accessing information from cookies and users' scrambled email addresses that wil serve up more relevant ad messages.
Twitter, which announced the program on Wednesday in a blog post, used this hypothetical example:
How does this work? Let’s say a local florist wants to advertise a Valentine’s Day special on Twitter. They’d prefer to show their ad to flower enthusiasts who frequent their website or subscribe to their newsletter. To get the special offer to those people who are also on Twitter, the shop may share with us a scrambled, unreadable email address (a hash) or browser-related information (a browser cookie ID). We can then match that information to accounts in order to show them a Promoted Tweet with the Valentine’s Day deal. This is how most other companies handle this practice, and we don’t give advertisers any additional user information.
The company is letting consumers opt out of the program by allowing users to uncheck the box next to "promoted content" in their account settings. Since Twitter supports Do Not Track (DNT), "Twitter will not receive browser-related information from our ad partners for tailoring ads if users have DNT enabled in their browser," according to the company.
The move comes after Facebook introduced a similar program over the past year.