According to a blog post published on Tuesday from Twitter, Some users have provided their phone number to Twitter to make their accounts more secure while the company claims that they used this information for advertising unintentionally.
It’s not the first time that a popular social media platform took their user’s personal information for security purposes and knowing or unknowingly used it for totally different reasons.
The well known social media company, Facebook had a similar incident with contact numbers provided by users for two-factor authentication which they accepted last year.
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What Does Twitter Say?
According to the Twitter announcement “We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system,”.
Twitter said “This was an error and we apologize. We’re very sorry this happened and are taking steps to make sure we don’t make a mistake like this again,”.
Who Got Affected?
Twitter informed that they are not certain about how many users were affected by the issue but they said the problem was fixed on 17 September.
This incident will make users think twice before providing their information to social media or rather say online platforms. Although two-factor security is a good security practice for most Twitter users.
How Secure Social Media Platforms Are?
Incidents like this always force us to analyze how secure these platforms are for their users.
Twitter has been entangled in its own controversies about how it handles its user’s privacy. Recently Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO’s account was hacked and hackers were able to tweet racial slurs via text messages.
In May 2018, a bug was detected on Twitter so they asked to update their passwords to all its 330 million users. But assuring them Twitter said that no information was breached or misused.
There has been plenty of news that revealed the Government’s intention to have us link our social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp with our Aadhaar number.
In order to link the Aadhaar card with social media accounts, the Government authorities would require underlying details, such as address and mobile number. However, this is not allowed by the Aadhaar Act.
How Easy It Is To Hack Twitter Account?
Twitter accounts getting hacked is a common phenomenon. Many users, especially those who are new to this platform or are not too tech-savvy wonder how twitter messages go out on their name without their interaction.
This article shows exactly how 90 percent of twitter accounts get compromised.
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