Another Twix-up!
October 20, 2009 – 9:04 am by Griffin HammondBefore you use Twitter to store your ATM PIN numbers, remember, it can’t be trusted. The micro-blogging platform, which is dominated by a culture of open, public communication, also provides some privacy: direct messages and protected profiles.
But as the L.A. Times pointed out last night, the latter is prone to a major security hole: Google.
Many of those protected messages can be found through Google’s search engine. The results page shows an index of the tweets it has logged…
For example, a search for Bill Clinton’s [private] profile spits out the first few words of tweets.
While the full text of @billclinton’s tweets remains hidden, and the links dead-end, these snippets (on the right) appear (for now) on a Google results page, simply by using the site-specific Google search syntax: site:
In April, a different security screw-up afflicted Twitter’s other “private” function: direct messages. For a few hours, direct messages (DMs), which are intended to be private communications, like e-mail, were delivered to the wrong people.
Here’s what showed up in my inbox (left). (Mind you, I know none of these people, and none of the messages were intended for me, especially the last one.)
Moral of the story: Twitter’s great for public dialogue, but think twice before sharing anything else. You never know where it might end up.
