Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media applications have a unique opportunity to gather data from the majority of the general public due to their overwhelming proliferation in the lives of their users. Twitter has publicly announced their most recent foray into data collection in the form of “app graph” which is supposed to give Twitter the ability to provide a better user experience.
Note that I refuse to say that this is Twitter’s first foray into the data mining of their users. All social media apps thrive on the information they learn and know about their users. At least this move is a public one and there are actions users can take to limit their exposure. Sophos has provided those instructions and deeper dive into this process by Twitter in this article.