This morning I was reading the USA Today online and ran across this article about Twitter and the governments push towards privacy.
Twitter agreed to establish a security program subject to government monitoring for the next 10 years and barred it from misleading consumers about privacy. Twitter agreed to those terms in exchange for the FTC not pursuing a civil lawsuit against the company.
This is all coming to light probably because in January 2009 President elect Barack Obama’s twitter account was hacked and was used to tweet a BS $500 free gas offer to his followers.
My first question is with so many high profile people using Twitter why wouldn’t you do this on your own. Why do you need to be caught and forced to make this change to avoid a lawsuit by the government. I would think as a company this would be automatic but obviously I am dead wrong. Also, forget the high profile people how about all of us regular people who have has our Twitter accounts hacked and bogus DM’s sent with our names attached to it.
Security should be the first order of business when setting up this kind of network. I understand we as Twitter users disclose a lot of personal information to the public but that is because we want to and not because our accounts are being hacked and we are then forced to.
I am not a fan of government stepping in and taking control of everything they can but maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this will open the social media’s eyes to this kind of stuff in the future being this is all so new.
At least we know our Twitter accounts might become more protected. HOPEFULLY!!!!
