Thursday, June 24, 2010

Twitter Settles F.T.C. Charges on Privacy - NYTimes.com

So … Twitter can resume misleading people on privacy again in 2030?  There’s a simple solution in this context: assume everything you share on Twitter (and also on Facebook, assuming you have something other than a tiny and totally trusted collection of friends) will be public and preserved forever.

For the last 11 months, the F.T.C. has been looking into two security breaches at Twitter in 2009 in which a hacker accessed the accounts of several high-profile members, including then President-elect Barack Obama, and was able to read their private Twitter messages and send out fake messages from their accounts.

As part of the settlement, Twitter, based in San Francisco, agreed to set up a security program that will be audited by an outside company, and, according to the F.T.C.’s news release on the case, “will be barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it maintains and protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information.”

Twitter Settles F.T.C. Charges on Privacy - NYTimes.com

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