Twitter has been criticised as being irresponsible after the
e-mail address of celebrity
Jonathan Ross was made available through the microblogging
service's search facility.
Ross, who has over 200,000 followers on Twitter, accidentally
included his e-mail address in a Tweet and deleted it immediately,
but users were still able to find it through Twitter's search
facility.
Twitter users may think they have deleted a posting, but it is
never really deleted as all posts are accessible through using the
service's advanced search facility, IT security firm Sophos has
revealed.
"There is no reason for Twitter to keep those posts and in fact,
this is really irresponsible behaviour," said
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
"In Ross's case, his e-mail could have been scooped by spammers
or used by fraudsters," he said.
According to Cluley, this is a gaping security hole in the way
Twitter works. Twitter needs to recognise this and allow its
members to delete messages from all of Twitter, he said.
Earlier this month,
Twitter was forced to backtrack on a change to its settings
that caused controversy among users of the social networking
site.
The company changed its settings so users could not see the
replies of people they follow if they were speaking to people they
do not follow.
The move was unpopular, with users saying they used the feature
to find new people they are interested in.