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by maintopbiz 4476 days ago
Hi, I am a co-founder of RiteTag. Don't worry we are not any spam bot. But unfurtunately, Twitter has only 3 types of permissions:

1) Read 2) Write 3) Direct messages

We cannot go only for Read because we need to allow users to sent and schedule tweets via RiteTag. But we do not send anything that user hasn't manually approved.

Write permission goes automatically with Update your profile even though we don't use it at all. As developers, we cannot select only Posting tweets. That's Twitter's policy. It doesn't make sense for us either.

Lastly, we were playing with direct messages a year ago. We don't need them now and we could turn them off. But in the meantime we got more than 7000 users and if we change the permissions RiteTag would stop working for them until they re-authorize it. This means all the tweets they have scheduled would not be sent.

Here is more info from Twitter, if you are interested: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model

2 comments

Thank you for your detailed response. I understand that there are technical limitations when it comes to permission, but it still makes me uneasy when I have to give that many permissions to a new app. Maybe it's the granularity at Twitter that is wrong and should be changed, but if there's any way you can ease down on the permissions I think that would be appreciated by many users.
Regarding not wanting to turn off the DM permission in order to avoid a disruption to 7000 users, as the DM permission is a disquieting thing that will prompt complaints as this gains popularity and 7000 isn't that high a number, you might want to just rip the band aid off and get it over with now..
Founder of RiteTag here, and always available @osakasaul in Twitter (Saul Fleischman). FWIW, in regards to 7K users not being a high number, it took us 25 months to get to 7K users. Many signed up well over a year ago. Asking them all to remove permission in Twitter settings and then auth in again, we'd lose so many people who are not used to going into Twitter settings, and would simply go away. But thank you very much for the feedback - and also, a worthwhile opinion on the problem with Twitter permissions.