California, United States — Twitter has recently disclosed in a regulatory filing that they could face a FTC fine of $250 million.
Twitter mentioned that the US authorities could fine them up to $250 million over the use of phone numbers and email addresses to target advertisements.
On July 28, the social media company had received a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission claiming that Twitter had used data “provided for safety and security purposes for targeted advertising during periods between 2013 and 2019,” said in the filing. Twitter estimated that this complain could result in a loss of between $150 million and $250 million.
While all Twitter users are asked to provide information such as their phone number’s for the purpose of securing their account, -through services such as two-factor authentication- Twitter had admitted last October that they infact had “inadvertently” targeted ads at users through contact details that they provided for security purposes. However, FTC had declined to comment on the matter.
FTC had previously made the largest fine in the commission’s history, reaching a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over the mishandling of the users data.
FTC sent a complaint against Twitter after around two weeks of the massive Twitter hack that compromised high-profile Twitter accounts including those of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and a few days after Twitter released their latest earnings report where it reported revenues of $683 million for the second quarter of 2020.
