You know that thing where the Android twitter account wants to “use your installed apps to customize your experience”? The latest in privacy intrusion features from the app that also wants to upload all your contacts to Twitter’s servers and will require you to remember to uncheck the box literally every time you set up a new account on any device ever if you don’t want your entire address book to be shared with them.

Well, as with all of the other obviously global settings on Twitter’s Android app (such as “No you may not beep at me. Oh god why are you beeping. Stop, please.”) it’s a per account setting. If you have multiple twitter accounts set up on the app, you need to turn off the “It’s OK to spy on the rest of my phone” on each one.

This was finally enough to prompt my growing desire to uninstall this app, so I did.

At which point I was reminded that Twitter’s mobile website is of the “Hey? Did you know we have an app? Have you forgotten since the last page that we have an app? Maybe you’d like to install our app? Have you maybe changed your mind about maybe installing our app? How about now?” school of design.

Which is why the second important thing I learned is that if you want to not be constantly annoyed by the only way to use Twitter on your phone without it trying to take all the rest of your data along with it, the solution is to click the “Request Desktop Site” checkbox in the settings menu. You’re on the mobile subdomain, so you’ll still get the mobile site, but the UA won’t say you’re on Android so you won’t get the constant needy requests to install the app.