Wednesday, July 15, 2009

How safe is your Twitter account?

Twitter has been successfully hacked several times but the most egregious of them all is the breakin that compromised Twitter's own employee and other confidential information. I don't use Twitter but I am concerned about the security of other major social networks like Facebook, Orkut etc; frankly, I don't think they are much better. In the race to capture more and more users social networking websites and applications often ignore security and privacy issues. This is because these issues are considered an economic externality by these companies. In that respect, the information age is a bit like the early industrial era where corporations ignored the impact of their factories on the environment. We need laws that "internalize" these externalities. But given the focus of the government on the economic crisis, health reform and other issues, will this important issue be addressed?

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