Twitter Bug Exposes Private Tweets [Updated]

If you’re one of the about 10% of Twitter users that protect your tweets, watch out, because anybody can read them with a simple Google search.

The security hole, first reported by The L.A. Times, reveals that, by just typing “site:twitter.com/*username*” (replacing *username* with the Twitter name of a protected account), you can see most or all of the tweets of an account. And it’s already being used to see the tweets of Bill Clinton, and others.

Apparently, while you can’t directly access a protected Twitter account, Google’s crawling bots can pass right by without any problem. By looking at the Google results, you can get a sense of what that person is tweeting about. For example, here’s what comes up when you search Bill Clinton:

Yeah, you can find some juicy stuff, and that is not good at all for the microblogging startup.

So what can you do if you have a protected Twitter account? Unfortunately, there is not much you can do until Twitter fixes this security hole. For now, don’t tweet anything sensitive if you have a protected account. We have informed Twitter of the issue and if there is any new information on this story, we’ll bring you the update.

Update: There are reports that Google bots don’t crawl private accounts, but tweets from accounts before they were privatized. We are checking with Twitter to see if this is accurate.

Reviews: Google, Twitter

Tags: twitter