Remember we told you about the hashtag happy judge a couple of weeks ago who ruled against an Occupy Wall Street protestor attempting to protect his tweets from prosecutors? Well, not only was the judge’s use of hashtags off, but it turns out the judge obviously didn’t have a firm grasp of Twitter’s terms of service either. (Let’s hope.)
Read more

Even respected journalists are sometimes fooled by Twitter accounts claiming to be popular sports figures. With schools facing and handing out penalties for  student athletes’ misguided posts more and more often, isn’t it inevitable that one of these “parody” accounts will eventually cross the line and claim to be genuine?
Read more

Did you hear about the TweetDeck bug that allowed users to login and tweet from other accounts that didn’t belong to them? Well, it got us thinking about applications that we allow to access our data and the reality that “online privacy” really is an oxymoron.
Read more

If you’re in high school and you post a tweet (from home) that’s full of f-bombs should you be expelled from school? That’s the question at the heart of this controversy, but the details will surprise you.
Read more

In Vancouver, two men were shot in front of a popular downtown restaurant. One of the wounded men, 24-year-old rapper Lazeevil, tweeted that he was eating at the restaurant, Italian Kitchen, twice before the shooting happened.
Read more

How “evolved” are you when it comes to personal privacy on Twitter?

Do you send out personal updates that fall under the “too much information” (TMI) category? Maybe that’s part of what Biz Stone was referring to at a recent speech in Salt Lake City when he shared his observation that “users are still evolving their “digital selves,” particularly on issues of personal privacy.”

If you tweet with any regularity, we have some points you should be aware of – and possibly rethink.
Read more

What do Britney Spears, Lance Armstrong, Barack Obama, Facebook, the Dalai Lama and Fox News all have in common?

Answer: they’ve all had their Twitter profiles hacked. In fact, eight of Twitter’s top 10 most-followed users have had their accounts exploited, largely through to ineffective passwords.  With social media now more popular than ever, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly littered with viruses, malware and scams, and it’s increasingly essential that users take responsibility and familiarize themselves with the basics of internet security to stay safe.

Bottom line? If it can happen to them, it can happen to you.

Read more

As social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn become an increasingly important part of all of our lives, the information that we choose to share on these channels becomes exponentially significant and ‘risky’, inasmuch as what and how often we choose to share the things we are doing with the rest of the world.

Barracuda Labs surveyed people from 21 countries about their social networking habits and attitudes towards online privacy and security.

Read more

Privacy and security within social media is a very hot topic, and Facebook in particularly has been dragged over the coals on multiple occasions for what has been perceived by many as a very casual, even flippant attitude towards the safety of their users.

But here’s the thing: unlike Twitter, Facebook – despite attempts to the contrary – is not really an open, public network. While the history of Mark Zuckerberg’s baby is littered with controversial default privacy settings, if you make just a little effort with your Facebook settings it’s fairly easy to ensure that your daily updates, likes and other interactions are protected from uninvited guests.

This isn’t the case with Twitter. You only have two options: everything you say is public, or everything you say is protected. The vast majority of users wisely choose the former option, as Twitter is an open network. The things you say are meant to be seen by others. Even people you don’t know. And thanks to functionality like retweets, Twitter encourages you to share information with your network, who will often pass that message on to complete strangers. And vice versa.

And while most of us get along with that just fine, sometimes things go horribly wrong. And it’s at these moments that we realise that Twitter isn’t a particularly secure medium for communication. That is, of course, the point, but, given enough time, it’s incredibly easy to become complacent over something that’s fundamentally linked to security online: the cameras are always on, and you’re always being watched.

Read more

Almost two years ago I wrote a post about Twitter’s decidedly useless block functionality, that stated the reasons why this ‘block’ isn’t actually a block at all. Why? Because it doesn’t actually block anything.

Block somebody on Twitter and they can still read your timeline, send you replies and retweet your messages, giving the impression to others that you are still friends. So unless you take the rather drastic step of making your timeline completely private, which is overkill and a bad idea for most users, certainly if they want to use Twitter for business, a block is almost a complete waste of time.

The article resonated with readers, and is actually the most popular piece I’ve ever written, traffic-wise, ranking highly on Google for a number of related keyword searches. And with the news this week that a change in Californian law may force social networking sites to review their privacy policy, this is a great time for Twitter to step up, do the right thing and implement a block system that actually works.

And there’s a really simple way they could do it. In fact, all it needs is one extra checkbox in your settings.

Read more