Three’s a crowd. But when you go to a website it’s rarely a private line between you and your destination. There are often a few third parties there, too: reading your feed, accessing your data, and crunching your numbers. Maybe you gave them your blessing when you first downloaded them, but did you know they are still there, lurking and listening?
If you'd rather keep your weird Twitter habits close to the vest, you’ll be happy to know that the social media giant keeps you in the loop about who's reading your tweets with a dashboard that shows what applications and websites are reading and analyzing your feed, with a log showing when, how and from what IP address location different applications read your Tweets. Twitter also gives you control to discontinue a relationship with a third party—which is pretty great because typically once you click that you agree to how a website or app wants to access your data, the only way to discontinue the relationship is to uninstall and close your account. And even then it’s hard to be sure that the company or application really stopped listening into your activity. This isn't new. It was released in July, 2015, but it's a cool thing you should know about if you don't already.
Twitter’s controls differ from those of Facebook, which require you to access each app that connects to your Facebook account and discontinue the sharing agreement piecewise. Twitter, on the other hand, consolidates the information and lets you easily remove apps you no longer want accessing your data.
To look at which apps are accessing your Twitter account and selectively revoke access, just open Twitter for the Web, then go to Settings > Your Twitter Data and confirm your password. Once confirmed, you'll see a Device History, that shows you everywhere you have the Twitter App downloaded, and a Login History, which shows you a running tally of recent apps that have accessed your account. If anything in the list looks iffy, go to the Apps tab and hit Revoke Access.
And then when you tweet, it may still be a crowd, but it'll be a crowd you chose.
Updated with a hat tip to SecuriTay for pointing this out.
