Twitter improves user data policy ahead of new European privacy laws

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it is updating its privacy policy to allow users to view information they share with the microblogging service and show how it's being used, ahead of new regulatory guidelines on European data privacy laws.

Tech companies are under intense scrutiny about how they protect customer data after Facebook Inc was embroiled in a huge scandal where millions of users' data were improperly accessed by a political consultancy.

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect May 25 and is the biggest shake-up of privacy rules since the birth of the internet.

Twitter's privacy update coincides with GDPR's rules. The changes are meant to make the privacy policy visually clear and easy to use, Twitter's Data Protection Officer Damien Kieran wrote in a blog post.

Twitter said it is expanding and revising the privacy policy content to make some legalistic or technical language as clear as possible.

"We think it's absolutely essential that you know exactly what we mean when we refer to location data or data from advertising partners," it said.

(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar, Bernard Orr)