Twitter has finally admitted a privacy breach exposed tweets intended to be seen only by users’ closest friends to the entire site, after weeks of ignoring reports on the issue.
Breitbart News previously reported that a bug in Twitter’s “Circle” feature exposed private tweets to uninvited users on the social network. Now, the Guardian reports that after ignoring reports of a privacy breach for weeks, Twitter has finally acknowledged that tweets meant to be seen only by users’ closest friends were made public.
Elon Musk strikes a pose (Hannibal Hanschke-Pool/Getty Images)
Similar to Instagram’s Close Friends setting, the Circles feature enables users to compile an exclusive list of friends and post tweets that only they can see. Because of this, users can express personal opinions, share explicit images, or post irreverent statements without worrying about their wider network or the general public finding out.
Twitter acknowledged the security failure in an email to affected users that was obtained by the Guardian. It said: “A security incident that occurred earlier this year may have allowed users outside of your Twitter Circle to see tweets that should have otherwise been limited to the Circle to which you were posting.”
Users had been complaining for weeks that accounts that shouldn’t have been able to see their Circle tweets were liking and viewing them. Twitter, however, has only just now acknowledged the reports.
“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,” the company said in a statement.
Twitter has gone through considerable turmoil since Elon Musk bought it in late 2022, including a massive headcount reduction as a result of numerous waves of layoffs. Numerous site outages, puzzling rule changes, and a reduction in office resources are the results of this. According to Musk, the website won’t be reliable until a “complete rewrite” of its underlying code is finished.
Read more at The Guardian here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan