Twitter has agreed to settle a privacy lawsuit with the US Competition Authority and the US Department of Justice. Twitter will pay $150 million. This is evident from court documents on Wednesday.

Thus, Twitter prevents it from being sued for providing contact information to advertisers.

Twitter collects phone numbers and email addresses from users to secure access to their accounts, which is not uncommon for online service providers. But according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice, the social media company then sells this data to advertisers. This allows personalized advertisements to be shown to users.

Between May 2013 and September 2019, more than 140 million users shared their phone numbers or email addresses with Twitter, according to the FTC. The competition authority regarded Twitter’s practices as a violation of a 2011 settlement, in which Twitter committed, among other things, to more transparency.

In the meantime, American billionaire Elon Musk has increased his direct contribution and that of his investors in the acquisition of Twitter to 33.5 billion dollars. For example, the amount that billionaire borrows from banks decreases. That is according to a document that was filed with the US stock market regulator Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.

Musk, co-founder and CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla, had initially taken out $25.5 billion in loans but has reduced that amount to $13 billion. He doesn’t want to take out loans backed by his Tesla shares anyway. The Twitter acquisition will cost a total of $44 billion.