Thursday, April 24, 2008

Twitter Privacy Breach

Twitter, the social networking site which functions as a public broadcast/update/news feed/megaphone for users, accidentally displayed the direct (private) messages of several users in their public message stream. The breach is thought to have been the result of GroupTweet, a third party application which allows users to direct message several people at once. I'm a little confused since I thought the whole point of Twitter was to tell as many people as possible what you're doing at every moment, and that things like e-mail were for private messages....All the same, it's on obviously frustrating (and potentially embarrassing) technical snafu to suffer through. This comes on the heels of several of Tumblr's most highly-trafficked blogs being hacked, as well as any number of complaints and bad press regarding privacy violations resulting from various Facebook partnerships with programs like Beacon. In addition to all of the problems with privacy (or lack thereof) on the internet, I think this raises interesting questions about opening up web programs to third-party applications, which (apparently) may have the potential to damage the basic infrastructure and/or effectivity of the site itself.
Source: TechCrunch

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