Technology

Twitter Shares its Ideas around New Privacy Features, Including a Way to Hide your Account from Searches

Twitter Shares its Ideas around New Privacy Features, Including a Way to Hide your Account from Searches

Twitter today shared some more ideas about it in terms of new features around conversation health and privacy. It includes a one-stop “privacy check-in” feature that allows users to control Twitter’s new conversation controls and others by introducing different accounts so that people can be more personal in the service, or public and private tweets or more easily navigate between them. Of these, the privacy check-in feature will probably be the most used, as a recent innovation from Twitter has further complicated the service.

Over time, a central destination like Google or Facebook privacy checkups where users can adjust their privacy controls – can be a valuable addition. Twitter’s privacy check-in feature will allow users to go through multiple questions that help them decide what they want to be public or private on their Twitter platform. For example, they can choose whether or not everyone can view their tweets, who are allowed to send them direct messages, or who can tag photos. Other new ideas under consideration include a tweet on the compose screen to better highlight which account you are posting from (and if it is public), as well as any other features that will add a reminder when you reply to someone from a personal account.

Twitter Shares its Ideas around New Privacy Features, Including a Way to Hide your Account from Searches

The reminder will warn you that the account will not be able to see your response because your account is currently set to “Protected”. This will provide a tool for publicly switching your tweets so that you can participate in the conversation. The most interesting idea is being considered but it has to do with your discovery. Often, when someone is being harassed by a group, it starts to attract more unwanted attention. The user may report trolls for offensive reasons, this will not stop their attack immediately. To deal with this type of troll brigade, some users set their account to be private or delete their Twitter account altogether.

The potential new feature of Twitter will offer a third option: to hide your account. Users can be warned about the increased negative attention received through push notifications to their account and then point to new privacy controls that allow them to disable the ability to search other Twitter users.