Twitter fined $150 million for using user data for unauthorized advertising purposes

Twitter, which is in the process of being acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) $150 million to resolve allegations that it misused non-public information collected for security purposes to serve targeted ads. In addition to fines for "misrepresenting privacy and security practices," the company was banned from profiting from deceptively collected data and ordered to notify all affected users. "Twitter took data from users under the pretext of using it for security purposes, but later used that data to target users with ads," FTC Chairman Lina M. Khan said in a statement. "This app has impacted more than 140 million Twitter users, while also increasing Twitter's primary source of income.