Today, we announced changes to the Twitter platform in anticipation of new EU privacy laws going into effect. In parallel, we’re also making some important changes to our developer platform that will take effect over the coming weeks.
What’s changing?
We’re making the following changes to our terms and policies:
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Twitter Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates: As announced in today’s blog post, Twitter has updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, effective May 25th. All users will be prompted about these updates when they log into Twitter.
- Please note: Accounts that do not accept these updates may be deactivated. If your service or application serves users who do not access Twitter through an official Twitter client, encourage them to log into Twitter.com or Twitter’s own Android or iOS mobile apps in the coming months to review these updates and consent to any changes as needed.
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Developer Agreement changes: We will be making changes to the Twitter Developer Agreement in advance of May 25th. These changes will include privacy, security, and data protection updates. Watch for these updates to ensure you remain in compliance.
You’ll also see changes to a few of our product offerings:
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User timezones are becoming private values in the API: Timezone values in Twitter user objects will become private fields after May 23. As a result, the
time_zone and utc_offset values will be returned as null on the users/show, users/lookup, and account/verify_credentials endpoints, or any other endpoints that return user objects as part of their response values. They will continue to be available on the account/settings endpoint, for authenticated users only.
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Background profile image data is going away: We will be removing stored background profile image data from Twitter on May 14. Background profile images have not been available or visible on Twitter.com since July 2015, and this update will remove all stored background image data from profiles that previously had this configured. Please download any files you’d like to save before they go away on May 14. You can do this by checking for the relevant fields in the user object in the API, and downloading from the linked URL. In the future, the
profile_background_image_url and profile_background_image_url_https fields will be returned as their default values. Note that this applies to the value of the profile_background_image_url fields, and not to profile_banner_urls, which are unaffected and remain a supported feature.
For more information about privacy changes across Twitter, please review Twitter’s GDPR hub.
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Changes to the user timezone fields are now live - time_zone and utc_offset fields will now be returned as null in the majority of cases as documented above.
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