As many have seen through celebrities and paparazzi websites, Twitter has become an up and coming social utility that allows users to update the public on what they are doing, where they are doing it, and who they are with at all times. Blackberry and iPhone applications allow users to update their status from mobile devices and have granted people the liberty to access accounts everywhere. While most “tweets” (which are the status updates themselves on the personal page of a specific user) are public information, there are settings that allow a person to protect their tweets. Privacy protected tweets are supposed to grant access to people who are friends with that specific user, or in the case of Twitter, “following” a user online.
While this seemed to be the case for most of the time, a “bug” and a whole that was brought to light in an LA Times article, allowed private tweets to be accessed through Google. This bug compromised the personal tweets of protected users and has caused a scene in the technology world that many privacy protected users on Twitter do not appreciate. Information that is revealed through Twitter states that approximately 10% of users protect their tweets through the privacy standards offered by Twitter. In this article, the LA Times revealed that one could access Twitter tweets by typing “site:twitter.com/*username*” and replacing the username with the protected user account on Twitter. This bug allowed people to find protected tweets of these users, which compromised names such as Bill Clinton who used Twitter. While it doesn’t reveal the entire message Google can access the majority of the post through it’s search engine which is called the Googlebot. The protected tweets that many want to protect are now compromised and searchers can gain general knowledge on the information posted.
For example Bill Clinton’s tweets which are protected have been compromised. Here are a couple examples of what he tweets about, "John Edwards...why did you," "NY Gov got caught with a," "Oh Hillary, 3rd place in," and "I have been too depressed..." These were all revealed in the LA Times article on October 19, 2009. While we continue to update our privacy standards in the online community we can now see why it is so important to continually update and perform checks on our personal lives and networking utilities to maintain privacy and prevent any information to become compromised.
Sources:
A Twitter hole lets you Google protected tweets
http://mashable.com/2009/10/19/twitter-bug-exposes-private-tweets/
Posts
It's for reasons like this that people need to be really careful about what they post online. Regardless of privacy settings, whether it be twitter, facebook or myspace, if you don't want there to be the slight possibility of the whole world knowing what you wrote, don't post it online!
ReplyDeleteI am curious though, was it the real Bill Clinton, or someone else who posted those things? I'm kind of surprised Bill Clinton's twitter would even be private since most public figures use twitter as a kind of PR tool and want anyone to be able to see it.
I agree with TMGP. Though one should be able to trust protected settings or privacy settings on websites (one must wonder if these sites will continue to exist when they do not do what they say they are doing), you are ultimately responsible for what you post online. If you feel you must post something online, perhaps you really want to communicate it to a friend and this is your only means, it is wise to perform a quick search check of your own. As an individual, you can do all the things that these exploiters have done by simply going to Google and searching yourself. Doing this routinely, you can check on what personal information is readily available to the public and take action to ensure it is what you want it to be.
ReplyDelete