If you have been wondering why your mobile phone has been constantly alarming you to new tweets from people whom you do not know, then you might be a victim of the latest bug that has been found in the microblogging website.
According to various reports, there is a command line syntax that would allow almost anyone to force another Twitter user to auto follow someone else. This means that their tweets will automatically in the pages of whomever they want. It is not dangerous in the case that it does not actually allow other people to see into another user’s account, but it does get pretty harassing if you find yourself forced to read and weed out the Tweets of people you have been keeping out of your network.
At the very least, Twitter has been able to track down the bug quick and fast and as of the time of writing, the exploit is no longer available and users have been advised to check their accounts for any changes.
The increasing use of Twitter as a way to communicate and release official statements has become a well observed standard in the past few months. Many have learned that Twitter is powerful enough to get people mobilized and moving towards a single common goal (as shown with recent disasters).
This is why there is a certain degree of emphasis on the need to be more vigilant and careful about the use and abuse of web services such as these. Facebook on the other hand has been on the other end of the scale as it is them who are the main causes of privacy scares. With the continuous expansion of the social networking website, it is estimated that the trouble will go much further than the arguments and debates about data mining and the expansion of Facebook features into other websites (such as the “like” function).
Tags: Bug, Facebook, Social-networking, Twitter