Ducky
09-06-2009, 12:34 AM
I've closed my (TheDuckster) account there.
One less area for people to know what I'm up to. But being that I haven't used it since last year, seems the right thing to do anyway.
Twitter's not the only place where people can get info. Facebook, MySpace, etc, are classic examples.
[offsite:1n3rt6oc]But – not altogether surprisingly – a glitch has been discovered:
Twitter, the popular messaging site which has gained traction among the technorati, has come in for plenty of criticism for downtime, bugs and trouble keeping up with the volume of users signing up.
But its latest problem takes things beyond the merely irritating and into the realm of dangerous – by undermining user privacy.
… a glitch in the Twitter API – which is used to let third-party applications mash up Twitter data – has left “private” users looking very exposed indeed…. Private user information is visible on Twittervision’s many user pages, which are built from the information extracted from the API.
Right now this might seem like only a minor bug. But consider this: Twittervision’s pages are indexed by the search engines, meaning that messages that users may have sent privately between friends are now not only visible on the web – they are also potentially searchable forever.
While they can fix this going forward, what of those semi-private personal data streams that have already been indexed by Google?[/offsite:1n3rt6oc]
REad More HERE (http://michaelzimmer.org/2007/05/24/flaw-in-twitters-privacy-settings/)
One less area for people to know what I'm up to. But being that I haven't used it since last year, seems the right thing to do anyway.
Twitter's not the only place where people can get info. Facebook, MySpace, etc, are classic examples.
[offsite:1n3rt6oc]But – not altogether surprisingly – a glitch has been discovered:
Twitter, the popular messaging site which has gained traction among the technorati, has come in for plenty of criticism for downtime, bugs and trouble keeping up with the volume of users signing up.
But its latest problem takes things beyond the merely irritating and into the realm of dangerous – by undermining user privacy.
… a glitch in the Twitter API – which is used to let third-party applications mash up Twitter data – has left “private” users looking very exposed indeed…. Private user information is visible on Twittervision’s many user pages, which are built from the information extracted from the API.
Right now this might seem like only a minor bug. But consider this: Twittervision’s pages are indexed by the search engines, meaning that messages that users may have sent privately between friends are now not only visible on the web – they are also potentially searchable forever.
While they can fix this going forward, what of those semi-private personal data streams that have already been indexed by Google?[/offsite:1n3rt6oc]
REad More HERE (http://michaelzimmer.org/2007/05/24/flaw-in-twitters-privacy-settings/)