Twitter Bug Exposed Android Users Private Tweets
If you are an Android user and have a twitter account, it is time for you to be alert. The social networking site has recently discovered a bug which has been exposing tweets of some Android users that were intended to be private.
Twitter admitted that the social network accidentally exposed some Android users' protected tweets to the public for more than four years — a kind of privacy blunder that you'd typically not expect from such a reputed microblogging site.
When you sign up for a Twitter account, all your Tweets are public by default, allowing anyone to view and interact with your Tweets.
Though, Twitter also offers a tweet privacy option to manage your privacy if the user wants to keep their Tweets protected.
Enabling "Protect your Tweets" option makes your tweets private, and you'll receive a request whenever new people want to follow you, which you can approve or deny. It's just similar to private Facebook posts that limit your personal information to your friends only.
Recently, Twitter disclosed in its report that a twitter bug or glitch that left some Android users' protected tweets exposed since 2014.
The security flaw disabled the “Protect your Tweets” option for some users without their authorization, making their private tweets visible to the public, Twitter acknowledged in its Help Centre on Thursday.
Android users who made changes to their Twitter account settings, such as updating an email address or phone number associated with the account, using the Android app between November 3, 2014, and January 14, 2019, have had their tweets and messages exposed.
The programing blunder, as Twitter said, was fixed on January 14 and also gave assurance to web and iOS users that they won’t experience anything of such nature and weren’t impacted by the twitter bug.
Although, Twitter did not specify exactly how many Android users have been affected by this issue as of now. Four years is a long period, and it's likely that most users have changed their account settings at least once in that duration of time.
Therefore, the company is now contacting the users one by one and turning the privacy setting back on for the users who have been affected by the bug.
The social networking site is advising Android app users to be on the safer side and check their privacy settings to make sure the "Protect your Tweets" option is enabled.
The Twitter bug revelation came at the time when the microblogging site is already under European Union investigation for violating data-collection issues under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.
According to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European citizens have the right to request their personal data from companies, but when Twitter turned down a researcher's request to provide tracking data collected through the company's link shortening service, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) opened an investigation.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has been notified of this latest protected tweets security breach for Android app, and the commission is currently looking into the matter, the DPC said in an emailed statement.
Companies whose privacy policies and security measures are found lacking to protect the user's private data, face fines of 20 million euros or 4 percent of their annual global revenue from the year before, under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act that gives European citizens more control over their personal data.
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