A bullet has been dodged by Twitter during this week by settling all of its charges that are with the FTC for failing to protect the personal information of the users of the social network. Many people use Twitter as a mean to communicate with their friends or family. They also contact with their colleagues and other such users. Though they share some of the information about themselves but the users never want that all of their information should be visible to other users and that too without their consent. In the recent times, Twitter had to face some of the serious problems and among them some are also the ones that are observed by the company for the first time. The users of the social networking web site were given the wrong impression about the security and privacy policies and against which FTC has taken action.
FTC charging Twitter
It is stated by FTC that Twitter had some of the serious lapses in the data security of the company. As a result of this, Twitter must have the evaluation of the information security program independently after every three years. For 20 years, Twitter can also not mislead people and the users of the web site about the security and privacy polices of the company.
Twitter’s data visible to hackers
FTC had actually said that Twitter had been making data such as private tweets as well as the login data of the users easily available to the hackers during the time period of January-May in the year 2009. In this time, someone was also able to get the access to the administrative password of Twitter’s system just with the help of the password cracking software. Many of the user passwords were also reset by that particular user and which allowed other people to get access to those accounts. One other user was also able to get into the Gmail account of some employee of Twitter and with that he could steal some more of the passwords that were later on used for guessing the admin password of that employee to the system of Twitter. These were two of the separate issues which had created a lot of problem for the users of Twitter. Their passwords were visible to other just because of the fact that the admin password was visible to some user.
Warning to Twitter
In the previous days, FTC has also slapped social network Twitter by sending it warnings for not making the policies to its employees that they should make a practice of having safe passwords. Subsequently, Twitter tightened its password policies for making them somewhat difficult for other to guess. The policies of the company were changed and many changes were made so that the system of Twitter should become secure and error free. One post on the blog of the company has also stated that FTC is not looking for any monetary damages for this settlement. Rather, it is planning to keep a short leash on Twitter and has the ability to impose a penalty of $16,000 per incident if any of the security breaches incidents occur in the future time.
