Twitter issued an apology on Monday for accidentally sharing the location data of some users with a third-party company, saying it is “very sorry this happened.”
“You trust us to be careful with your data, and because of that, we want to be open with you when we make a mistake,” the social-media giant said in a statement. “We have discovered that we were inadvertently collecting and sharing iOS location data with one of our trusted partners in certain circumstances.”
The statement went on to explain that if a user had more than one account in the “Twitter for iOS” app and turned on the “precise location feature” for one of the accounts, location data may have been collected from any of the user’s other accounts that didn’t have the precise-location feature turned on. It added that the company had also accidentally shared some location data during an advertising process called real-time bidding.
Compromised users have been alerted, and the data has been deleted from the third party’s systems, according to Twitter.
“We have fixed this problem and are working hard to make sure it does not happen again,” the company’s statement said.