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Twitter beefs up reporting feature to protect personal information

Users can now indicate what kind of information is being shared that violates their privacy.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Twitter is updating the process for reporting tweets that share personal information, allowing users to specify what type of content violates their privacy .

The update was announced Thursday in a Twitter Safety channel tweet that included a GIF demonstrating the process step-by-step. Users will now have the option to specify whether a tweet reveals their contact information, home or physical address, financial information, a government-issued ID, or ID numbers.

Twitter said in the tweet the new feature will help it "move faster in reviewing reported Tweets that share personal information."

Twitter has come under fire multiple times in recent years for not doing enough to combat harassment on the platform. The new personal information feature enhances a set of tools Twitter introduced in 2014 to combat the vitriolic or abusive messages its members send to each other.

Twitter's update comes a day after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a framework the social media giant plans to use to build a more "privacy-focused platform." They include encrypting people's messages, making sure their messages and posts aren't stored for longer than necessary, and letting people communicate across any of the apps Facebook owns.

Social media companies have been under pressure to better protect their users' private data after revelations surfaced a year ago that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of up to 87 million users without their permission.