Twitter, "Did You Just Assume My Gender?"

Due to yesterday's new privacy update on Twitter, I was eager to examine the changes in my security and privacy settings. Not contrary to most other social media sites, I was informed that my privacy settings were becoming more lenient, now collecting non-Twitter-related browsing data up to 30 days from my last Twitter activity to store (from the previous 10-day limit). Twitter claims that this will allow for a more personalized and accurate experience by referring users to products and sites in which they are more likely to be interested.

On top of this offline-browsing policy extension, Twitter's pre-existing Do Not Track option which prevented websites from tracking and ad-targeting users has been removed (despite having held a polar-opposing view in 2012 when Twitter originally implemented the Do Not Track option). Apparently an option to manually prevent specific websites and companies from receiving user data will still exist, but I have not yet been able to find this option in the privacy and security settings. I was not even given the option to decline the new privacy update. I was simply told, "Twitter has updated it's privacy agreement!" with a big blue continue button and nothing else. I never agreed to THIS privacy agreement, Twitter just assumed I did. Never was I informed what the agreement even entailed, rather, I did my own research to find out these policy differences.

I claim that the majority of people do not read their privacy agreements or know how private their
browsing history actually is. Maybe if we did, we would be more interested in utilizing privacy settings like the ones Twitter claims to have. Maybe if we could actually find these privacy blocks, we would use them.

I mean, what good is having an option to say "No, I don't want you tracking my browsing data and commercializing it through ad-targeting" if I cannot find the settings even if I tried?
If you find them, let me know.

However, in the process of searching for these privacy blocks Twitter made another assumption on my behalf. Prompted with personal information including my gender, age, and interests I was left confused... then slightly vexed. Reason being, I had never entered any of this personal data. This is because Twitter has been collecting data from my activity and attempting to determine who I am, incorrectly I might add.

What really irks me is that I was assumed to be a male "based on my profile activity". This means Twitter has chosen to categorize certain online activity as male and female-specific. Considering all of my Twitter activity is tech-based, my inner-feminist was hotly awakened.

Twitter, if you cannot even assume my gender correctly, how can you expect to assume my position on privacy policies?

*It should be noted that it was likely not a person who manually decided what is considered "male" web-activity and "female" web-activity, rather, it was more likely to be the outcome of a machine learning algorithm that naturally developed its own predictors.