Twitter agreed to pay $150 million (€140m) to settle allegations the platform gave advertisers some user information that was supposed to be employed to strengthen account security, US authorities said on Wednesday. The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice accused Twitter of taking phone numbers or e-mail addresses provided to tighten privacy and then letting advertisers use the details to make money. “Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,” commission chair Lina Khan said in a release. The personal information that users hand over to tech companies, and how that data gets used, is a front of repeated conflict between regulators and powerful firms like Facebook parent Meta, Twitter and others. Clashes over privacy have resulted in periodic suits or settlements but critics have long called for a comprehensive updating of US national rules for how people’s data is handled online. In a five-year period ending in 2019, more than 140 million Twitter users gave phone numbers or e-mail addresses to the San Francisco-based service to help secure accounts...