Last year, Twitter launched Twitter Circle, a service that allowed users to limit the audience on certain tweets. The feature allowed users to share tweets with a pre-defined set of individuals without letting the whole of Twitter see those tweets.
However, a snafu from Twitter"s end last month resulted in Twitter Circle tweets becoming public and accessible to all of Twitter. Now, a month later, Twitter has finally acknowledged the issue and confirmed that a privacy breach did indeed gave everyone access to see tweets that were meant for Twitter Circle. In an email sent to the affected users, Twitter told that “a security incident that occurred earlier this year.”
Furthermore, the company mentioned that the issue “was identified by our security team and immediately fixed so that these tweets were no longer visible outside of your Circle”.
Twitter is committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use our service, and we understand the risks that an incident like this can introduce and we deeply regret this happened.
With Elon Musk destaffing the Twitter"s press office, it will be hard to know the reason for the privacy breach and if the company is taking steps to ensure this does not happen in the future.
Twitter has seen a huge turmoil since its acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk late last year. With the company facing lawsuits from former employees, advertisers leaving the platform and multiple outages, it has been a rocky ride for Musk"s latest experiment.
Source: The Guardian