Briefly plays very well with Twitter. You can share your takes directly to Twitter, and we promote your takes on Twitter, pull content directly from Twitter on your command, etc.
When you connect Briefly to your Twitter account, the api connection between services enables many of Briefly’s core features. Unfortunately, the permissions that Twitter asks for Briefly are much more than we need, and don’t look great, tbh. Twitter structures these permission requests with a bunch of permissions altogether, and we don’t have the ability to remove the permission requests we don’t need.
As of April 2022, this is how Twitter presents our permission request:
Let’s break this down:
- See Tweets from your timeline (including protected Tweets) as well as your Lists and collections: Briefly will read your tweets to see what you are interested in. We use an ML system to make inferences that we use to recommend anchors and users for you to follow.
- See your Twitter profile information and account settings: We will import your avatar, username, potentially your email, your bio, to get your Briefly account started as quickly as possible. You will see all of these attributes in your initial Briefly account and you can edit/remove anything that you do not like.
- See accounts you follow, mute, and block: We use this information to see if anyone you follow on Twitter is already here on Briefly.
- Follow and unfollow accounts for you: What?! We would never do this to your Twitter account.
- Update your profile and account settings: Never. Your Twitter account is your own, and nothing you do on Briefly will impact your Twitter account, except that you may choose to Tweet through Briefly, in which case your Briefly created tweets will appear on your Twitter timeline.
- Post and delete Tweets for you, and engage with Tweets posted by others (Like, un-Like, or reply to a Tweet, Retweet, etc.) for you: This one is very simple. You may elect to tweet your takes from Briefly through your Twitter account, without leaving Briefly. We would never do this without your specifically requesting us to. And we don’t do any of that other nonsense (engage with tweets posted by others, like, un-like, reply, retweet, etc.)
- Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you: Nope, we don’t do this.
- Mute, block, and report accounts for you: Not us. Don’t do that.
I hope this clears up the permissions disconnect. Twitter, if you’re listening, give us the ability to ask only for what we need!