Twitter tunes ad targeting system

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Twitter has begun letting businesses target marketing messages to people who have shown interests in what they have to offer.

“Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones,” senior director of product revenue Kevin Weil said in a blog post.

The feature to be tested in the United States will let shops share email addresses or identity information from software ‘cookies’ in Web browsers so that Twitter can pinpoint people interested in ads from those businesses.

Shared email information is scrambled into an unreadable ‘hash’ to protect privacy, according to Twitter.

“This is how most other companies handle this practice, and we don’t give advertisers any additional user information,” Weil said.

Twitter users wishing to disable the feature can uncheck a Promoted Content’ box in account settings.

“While we want to make our ads more useful, we also want to give users simple and meaningful privacy options,” Weil said.