Improved Privacy Needed on Twitter
July 29, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
I’m pretty public on my use of social media applications like Facebook, twitter and my own personal blogging. Normally I’m not too worried about what I share on these sites or who reads. I’ve not got much of anything to hide so I don’t think about it what people may think or see when they read something of mine.
Speaking with a friend of mine though and they were amazed at how easy it was for someone to find everything they’d said on twitter. Now, let’s clarify, unless you specifically have all of your updates protected, everything you tweet is going into the public timeline for ANYONE to read, not just those who follow you. People need to be aware of this.
Here’s the challenge though, even if you individually block someone from subscribing to your updates or "following" you, they can still follow you on your public timeline and see what you’re saying. Yes, this activity would be very stalker-ish and it’s annoying we have to worry about it, but it is what it is.
I normally am a little irritated when I’m followed by someone that has their updates protected as I believe twitter should be an open forum to some degree. This issue though has me really re-thinking how I feel about that. I would hate to exclude anyone that might have a reason to really be hiding from other individuals from using the service, but I’m not sure what the best answer is for everyone.
Perhaps it’s just education and let people know about the opportunities and risks. Perhaps you have an online persona like I do in "bnpositive", although it wouldn’t be hard to link the too in my case, there’s nothing specifically in my twitter profile that ties that account to my real name.
What do you think is the solution? Were you aware of the issue? Very interested in hearing your feedback and comments.
I think it’s an education thing. Unless you are set to private, everything is wide open.
Anyone can search without even having an account, so it would be impossible to block an individual from searching out your tweets if you had blocked them. They need to be more explicit on the “Block” button on what it does and doesn’t do.
I agree its an education thing…
Maybe you are correct there shouldn’t be a “private” option at all – I am also annoyed when I run across those people.
the nice thing about twitter is that it is so public. It’s been a great business and networking tool. (for me personally, Facebook is where my family and friends are… and that is locked down to those people but twitter is open — if I need a private tweet, thats why they put DMs in there)
Although one suggestion would be if you do block someone, then that user shouldn’t be able to see your tweets in public timeline/search (while logged in) — of course they would just log out, and go to your profile page however it would be a Little better… but doing that type of filtering might cause a performance problem… especially for some (select * from tweets where source “x” or “y” or “z” — for some that list would be quite long!)