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An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

privacy.twitter.com

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Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My very recent experience contradicts this. I removed my number and was immediately locked out until I added it back.

I don't think you tell Twitter that you canceled your cell phone contract. They don't need to know.

[deleted]

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#312

>To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account. And yet they actually demanded I give them mine, and have repeatedly, recently demanded a confirmation. Phone numbers are one of the worst 2fas.

I was just able to remove my phone number from my account settings and wandered into a Fred Sanford-level of junk data -- Twitter had me identified as a female (I'm male), had "interests" tied to me for both "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" and "Ben Shapiro" (they're most certainly not), and had my languages as "French" and "Indonesian" (I know only English). Bad digital hygiene.

Google always reverts back to Portuguese for me. No matter how many times I've changed it back. I went to Portugal for 5 days... a long time ago.

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Google is asking me to add 2FA to an account for work, and there's no way to do so except from phone numbers or Google Authenticator which I'd rather not use. It's the only service that doesn't let me use something like Authy for OTP.

You know Google Authenticator is just an implementation of the TOTP open standard right? There are plenty of alternative apps that will give you the same number to key in...

If you’re on a Mac, in safari you can just right click on the QR code and set it up in keychain, then you can just auto fill from safari, no need for a third party app.

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Google is asking me to add 2FA to an account for work, and there's no way to do so except from phone numbers or Google Authenticator which I'd rather not use. It's the only service that doesn't let me use something like Authy for OTP.

You know Google Authenticator is just an implementation of the TOTP open standard right? There are plenty of alternative apps that will give you the same number to key in...

Not if they flag you before, which is the same thing Twitter requests.

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#315
post #264
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is also like this and it drives me nuts.

They also refuse voip numbers. I am now at 20 back and forth emails with Discord support explaining I do not own a cell phone. They are seriously suggesting I buy one just to use Discord.

Yeah. I used to live in a semi-rural area with no mobile phone coverage, and the insane level of disbelief from places when you tell them "I have no mobile phone" was a real problem. Including banks, and other utilities. :(

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#317

>To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account. And yet they actually demanded I give them mine, and have repeatedly, recently demanded a confirmation. Phone numbers are one of the worst 2fas.

I was just able to remove my phone number from my account settings and wandered into a Fred Sanford-level of junk data -- Twitter had me identified as a female (I'm male), had "interests" tied to me for both "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" and "Ben Shapiro" (they're most certainly not), and had my languages as "French" and "Indonesian" (I know only English). Bad digital hygiene.

having worked in the data industry, this sounds about right. Digital fingerprinting is certainly real, but I was way more paranoid about what I thought companies knew about me before working in the industry. the data quality across the board is dogshit. Even for the best companies doing B2B data like D&B and Zoominfo which are talked about as being better than most of the others - it's still mostly dirt.

Data right now is typically bought and sold with an expectation that most of it is crap. it's faster to buy and process 5000 dirty items that probably has a few good leads buried within it than to find leads manually / naturally or broadcast random advertising. (I left the industry in 2020 and my NDA expired in 2021)

Data quality is typically assessed at the "Does this data field have a value for this line item" level. That means data vendors are financially incentivized to make shit up about you as much as they can get away with. think about it for a second, these companies are selling themselves as the source of truth. the actual accuracy does not matter, and the better you are then the less data your customers buy. the data goes stale faster than the accuracy of the data becomes relevant

Did you like a post about a fresh baked baguette that had #french as one of the 100 tags associated with it? congrats, you're french now. it's not exactly this ridiculous, but you get my point

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#318
Anyone else annoyed by the growing use of the word "impact" to speak increasingly passively?

People are so afraid to make a claim nowadays, even if it's obviously true. They speak of "impacts" or that something will be "impacted". But they seem to want to avoid saying who or what will be impacted.

"I was impacted by today's layoffs." "We expect there to be impacts to website traffic."

These meaningless words do nothing except to say "something has happened" which puts the reader in the mindset of having to unravel a mystery.

Anytime you write it's your job to make yourself understood. I don't want to have to be Encyclopedia Brown to figure out what you're trying to tell me.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impacting&year...

Edit: A better headline for OP would have been "Private phone numbers + email addresses leaked for 5M Twitter accounts"

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Google is asking me to add 2FA to an account for work, and there's no way to do so except from phone numbers or Google Authenticator which I'd rather not use. It's the only service that doesn't let me use something like Authy for OTP.

Do you have something against TOTP? Isn't it better than Authy?

Authy is a TOTP app.

Re: An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just able to remove my phone number from my account settings and wandered into a Fred Sanford-level of junk data -- Twitter had me identified as a female (I'm male), had "interests" tied to me for both "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" and "Ben Shapiro" (they're most certainly not), and had my languages as "French" and "Indonesian" (I know only English). Bad digital hygiene.

Google always reverts back to Portuguese for me. No matter how many times I've changed it back. I went to Portugal for 5 days... a long time ago.

Had a similar issue with Prime Video - it kept displaying only Indian suggestions even though I only visited India for a short time. I don't remember how I corrected it.
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