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Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

bbc.com

11–20 of 196 posts

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#11
post #6

Shouldn't this involve lots of penalties? This has the potential to change/ruin lives drastically. A prudent consumer never trusts what the companies say nowadays. However, that shouldn't absolve the company of falsely claiming private product when it isn't so.

Most consumers aren't prudent.

Source: see warnings on any American packaging.

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#12
post #6

Shouldn't this involve lots of penalties? This has the potential to change/ruin lives drastically. A prudent consumer never trusts what the companies say nowadays. However, that shouldn't absolve the company of falsely claiming private product when it isn't so.

A prudent consumer would read the terms of service.

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#13
post #10
post #9

Just my own opinion, but at this point I think it's prudent to assume that pretty much anything you send out into the digital network world is public. If it's not something you would want the world knowing you said, don't put it out there. Security breaches happen. Bugs happen. Sometimes law enforcement just comes by and says, "Give me everything that user X has ever done." In short, sh!t happens. "Everything I do on…

Totally agree. But where does that leave us with “The Cloud”?

You can use the cloud with confidence...

for anything that you don't mind being publicly associated with you.

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#14
post #9

Just my own opinion, but at this point I think it's prudent to assume that pretty much anything you send out into the digital network world is public. If it's not something you would want the world knowing you said, don't put it out there. Security breaches happen. Bugs happen. Sometimes law enforcement just comes by and says, "Give me everything that user X has ever done." In short, sh!t happens. "Everything I do on…

With a couple exceptions perhaps, like Signal or iMessage? But I agree; unless the service is part of a very small whitelist, assume it's public.

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#15
This headline/article are pretty misleading. It makes the issue sound like if you had "Protect My Tweets" enabled, your tweets were still public.

From reading the original notice [https://help.twitter.com/en/protected-tweets-android] it sounds like the setting would just be disabled, which then made your tweets public. But not that Twitter's app would continue to say they were protected. That's a pretty significant difference (also by the fact that such a huge thing was not noticed for 6 years I'm guessing not many people were actually impacted)

Also just for fun, I'd wager how it happened is that the developer had some "default request object" that had "true" as the default setting for this and merged it with the updated property values ;) a classic

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#16
post #8
post #6

Shouldn't this involve lots of penalties? This has the potential to change/ruin lives drastically. A prudent consumer never trusts what the companies say nowadays. However, that shouldn't absolve the company of falsely claiming private product when it isn't so.

A prudent consumer also doesn't send 'live-destroying' messages on a public, hosted messaging platform, regardless of a private setting... Note that this isn't even about DMs.

I know someone with a common name who was first on gmail with that name. He gets a lot of emails that are meant for different people of the same name.

One of those others was accused in the Lloyds bank libor scandal, and the email came from the law firm they had hired.

Non-software people don’t have the faintest idea how computers work, and more than non-lawyers the law or non-economists money.

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#19
post #10
post #9

Just my own opinion, but at this point I think it's prudent to assume that pretty much anything you send out into the digital network world is public. If it's not something you would want the world knowing you said, don't put it out there. Security breaches happen. Bugs happen. Sometimes law enforcement just comes by and says, "Give me everything that user X has ever done." In short, sh!t happens. "Everything I do on…

Totally agree. But where does that leave us with “The Cloud”?

"The Cloud" is like storing your data with skywriting, you can see it from many locations, but so can your neighbors

Re: Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

#20
post #14
post #9

Just my own opinion, but at this point I think it's prudent to assume that pretty much anything you send out into the digital network world is public. If it's not something you would want the world knowing you said, don't put it out there. Security breaches happen. Bugs happen. Sometimes law enforcement just comes by and says, "Give me everything that user X has ever done." In short, sh!t happens. "Everything I do on…

With a couple exceptions perhaps, like Signal or iMessage? But I agree; unless the service is part of a very small whitelist, assume it's public.

except even those messages can become public, if one party makes them so, so even "secure" messaging should be considered compromised.
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