How to find out which advertisers are targeting you on Twitter

Twitter is trying to be more transparent about how your profile is shown to potential advertisers. On Wednesday, it announced an update to its privacy policy, which includes Your Twitter Data, which allows users to view and modify information about them that advertisers can see. This encompasses users' age, gender, language, what devices they use to access Twitter, places they've been and a number of other bits of information companies will gobble up to spit out what they think is the most enticing way to get you to buy what they're selling. Or maybe just to give 'em that sweet RT.

Along with being able to view or modify that data, users can request a list of advertisers that have targeted them. You just have to click the "Request advertiser list" button under the Your Twitter Data settings, and almost instantly you will receive a PDF of the Twitter handles of companies that dangled their sweet promotions in your feed. Mine was 69 pages of Twitter handles, including @randpaul, @realdonaldtrump, @hillaryclinton, @airbnb, @comcast and @twitter.  

Tweaking the data advertisers are able to see will have a direct impact on the types of ads you'll find in your feed, but as Twitter notes in Settings, "it won't remove you from advertisers' audiences." Simply put, while you can try and manage the thousands of advertisers looking to lure you in (according to my profile, I'm a part of 19,831 audiences from 4,019 advertisers), you can't hide from them.