GroupTweet Back Online, Promises No More Privacy Slip Ups
Michael Arrington
10 comments »
GroupTweet is a service that lets users send private Twitter messages to a group of other users. It’s works great, unless you screw up and accidentally enter your normal Twitter credentials into the site instead of the credentials for a new Twitter account you create for the service.
If you accidentally put in your normal Twitter credentials, the service took all of your private direct messages on Twitter and published them. Twitter user Orli Yakuel and others found this glitch the hard way, and suffered major embarrasement.
After we reported on this on April 23, GroupTweet creator Aaron Forgue shut the service down. Today he relaunched the service with a number of changes that he says will stop this from happening again.
First of all, he disabled all existing accounts. He updated instructions to be more clear. And he also set up the service so that only brand new Twitter accounts can be used - so if you still accidentally put in your normal account, it will detect it and show an error. Finally, the service now only retrieves message for one day.
Assuming all of these new features work properly, GroupTweet is likely safe to use even for the most careless of users.
Cheers to GroupTweet for being so responsible.
I blame Twitter for the problem as they allowed third parties too much access. They should have their shit on lock down by now.
Even if it is user error, Twitter should at least have a SPECIAL warning for GroupTweet users….
Zach, @1 - no, don’t blame twitter for being too open, @2 - no, twitter shouldn’t do anything special for third party apps
GroupTweet didn’t think through their service. This should have been an obvious problem to someone designing a piece of software. There is no reason to have any faith in them. They are sure to “overlook” major problems with their software again.
My recommendation is to keep away.
I am a strong proponent for openness BUT that does not mean at the expense of data that the user INTENDS TO BE PRIVATE. Data portability in every sense should be available as should security precautions that the USER should fully control.
Metacafe is the only decent alternative to the GooTube monopoly. I hope that they will keep growing. I think that they will!
Whether Aaron was careless or not in his original design (and I can’t really judge that), I have admired his rapid response to this whole mess. I wish him the best of luck.
shouldn’t twitter include this in their feature list ?