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Browse Twitter while protecting your privacy with Nitter

GeneralEdward Kiledjian
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Twitter changed its privacy policy this year, preventing its user from opting out of profiling for advertising purposes and informed users that it would be sharing more data with said advertisers.

I know that most users couldn't care less about their privacy but for the small band of privacy crusaders wanting to use Twitter without giving up their privacy, keep reading.

This Twitter front end is called Nitter. It is an open-source front end that redirects Twitter links to its interface, stripping all tracking code from the page or links. You cannot log into your Twitter account or send messages through Nitter (since that would allow tracking), and Twitter doesn't officially allow third party web interfaces to its services.

Here is the “business case” from the Nitter dev team in their own words

It's basically impossible to use Twitter without JavaScript enabled. If you try, you're redirected to the legacy mobile version which is awful both functionally and aesthetically.

For privacy-minded folks, preventing JavaScript analytics and potential IP-based tracking is important, but apart from using the legacy mobile version and a VPN, it's impossible. Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can essentially browse Twitter without JavaScript, while retaining your privacy.

In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in some cases serves pages faster. In the future a simple account system will be added that lets you follow Twitter users, allowing you to have a clean chronological timeline without needing a Twitter account.

There are countless ways to ensure Twitter links you click on open in Nitter (instead of Twitter).

Here is an example of my @ekiledjian Twitter page

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Most Twitter clients (e.g. Tweetbot, Twiterific, etc) are designed to log you into your account and therefore require you to log into your Twitter account through them, so Twitter can grant them a unique authentication token. This means that Twitter can revoke the tokens assigned to a client, if the client falls out of favour.

Nitter on the other hand is only requesting the public profile page of the account and then re-skins it to remove all trackers and beacons. Nitter is much more difficult to block.

There are times when certain public profile Twitter users will block you. In my case, I tweeted an article about corruption (written by a major Canadian newspaper) about the mayor of Brampton and he decided to block me on Twitter. To be clear, I never harassed him or did anything un-gentlemanly. I simply retweeted an article from a major Canadian newspaper that they themselves had tweeted.

But through Nitter, I can access all of his public tweets

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Hopefully you found this useful.