Add Twitter to the list of services keeping your contact list

One would think that after the mess surrounding Path and its previously unmentioned act of uploading your contact list to their servers that other companies would be doing everything they could to distance themselves from doing the same thing.

In the case of Twitter, everyone’s social media darling, it seems that they didn’t heed the very strong outcry from the public against doing this type of thing because the L.A. Times has up a post where the company has acknowledged that they have been doing exactly the same thing that got Path into trouble.

You see when you click on “Scan your Contacts for people you already know on Twitter” it, like Path, uploads your complete contact list, which includes email addresses, names, and phones numbers; and it keeps that information for 18 months.

As typical with all kinds of shady, and ethically questionable in my mind, Twitter doesn’t come right out and say that it does this anywhere in its privacy policy; but rather hides the retention time behind the term “Log Data”; which might include your IP address, browser type, referring domain, pages visited, mobile carrier, device and application IDs and search terms.

It goes on to add that other actions such as interactions with the Twitter site, applications and advertisements, may be included in that Log Data.

When asked about this Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner had this to say to David Sarno in the L.A. Times post:

“We want to be clear and transparent in our communications with users,” Penner wrote in an email. “Along those lines, 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” (in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, respectively).

Now Penner also did say that Twitter users can have the service remove their contact databases by using the “remove” link on this Twitter page.

via All Twitter