Twitter DMs – Not As Private As You Would Think

Twitter October 11, 2010 5 Comments

One of the quickest ways I have of communicating is by using Twitter DMs. It’s probably one of the quickest ways you can get a message to somebody within your network with the only provision being that you have to follow each other. There are many of us who use DMs in the same way that we use Text Messages on a phone (same amount of characters and essentially the same thing but different medium). I wanted to have a look at DMs properly though and see how private DMs actually are on Twitter and if we should all be using them to communicate private information. My guess here is that the tech savvy readers here will be well switched on to the security flaws but that most normal punters who are new to Twitter could be surprised to see that DMs are not as private as they would have thought…

How Do You Use Twitter DMs?

I thought I would do a quick bit of research to see how people have been using DMs and wasn’t really shocked to see the results. Although there were plenty of people who were clued in and said they wouldn’t share anything too private in their DMs there were just as many who shared lots via DMs.

Who Can See Your DMs?

There are lots of technical explanations on who can see your Twitter DMs which you can read here and here but essentially to sum it up anybody who is devious enough could see your DMs. Basically allowing applications to access your information as many of us do when we click “allow” on the screen below means that developers or people with access to the info being pulled in can see your DMs. Most applications are going to be perfectly safe but it really wouldn’t take a lot of effort for somebody malicious enough who owned an application to start riffling through your DMs.

How To Check Which Applications Have Access To Your Info

Many people click to allow applications without giving it a second thought only to forget that there tons of developers with access to their data. Luckily you can log in to Twitter and check which applications have access to your info. Simply go to the settings page on your profile and then hit “connections”. Once in connections you can see all the applications that have access to your info and revoke any that you no longer need or don’t trust. You’ll probably be surprised at how many you have allowed to access your information and totally forgotten about.

Use Common Sense

I would always say to people that if they are putting information online that you simply have to expect it to be found at some stage. Even if you are using private mediums like Email, Facebook messages and Twitter DMs there is always a chance that they could be exposed. Twitter DMs should be used in the same way as Twitter public messages and used to share simple information that you wouldn’t mind the whole world seeing because as you can see above that could be what happens!

Tags