Twitter users who tweet from their Android devices should review their settings now — especially if they have tweeted at any time between 2014 and 2019.
Apparently, a bug has been plaguing Twitter since 2014 which exposed the tweets of some Android users that were supposed to be private.
In a statement released by Twitter, the details surrounding a security flaw on were disclosed after the issue was fixed on January 14th. However, the bug didn’t affect people using Twitter on iOS or desktop.
The bug caused the Twitter for Android app to disable “Protect your Tweets” settings for those Android users who made certain changes to their account settings such as change of email address linked with the account.
Overall, the bug was active for a period of 5 years from November 3rd, 2014 and January 14th, 2019. The social networking platform says it doesn’t have a correct figure of how many Android accounts were affected.
But Twitter is reaching out to affected users to inform them of the same and also turned the setting back on for them. Nevertheless, it is recommended that users review their privacy settings to ensure that it is set according to their preference.
Twitter, is already under EU investigation for its data collection practices under the new GDPR rules. But now it is under a new privacy investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), for the security flaw caused by the ‘protected tweets’ bug.
If Twitter fails to improve its privacy practices, it would cost a hefty EU privacy fine, which, under the current GDPR rules would end up in about 4% it’s annual revenue.
