Blowing the Whistle on Twitter

They favored their profit over your privacy

By Phil Mattera for the Dirt Diggers Digest

There has never been much doubt that the tech giants do not take government regulation seriously, but it is helpful to get confirmation of that from inside the corporations. This is the import of a whistleblower complaint from the former security head of Twitter that has just become public.

Peiter Zatko submitted a document to the SEC, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission accusing top company executives of violating the terms of a 2011 settlement with the FTC concerning the failure to safeguard the personal information of users.

The agency had alleged that “serious lapses in the company’s data security allowed hackers to obtain unauthorized administrative control of Twitter, including both access to non-public user information and tweets that consumers had designated as private, and the ability to send out phony tweets from any account.”

Zatko’s complaint, which will play into the company’s ongoing legal battle with Elon Musk over his aborted takeover bid, alleges that Twitter did not try very hard to comply with the FTC settlement and that it prioritized user growth over reducing the number of bogus accounts.

These accusations are far from surprising. In fact, three months ago Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to resolve a case brought by the FTC and the Justice Department alleging that it was in breach of the 2011 settlement for having told users it was collecting their telephone numbers and email addresses for account-security purposes while failing to disclose that it also intended to use that information to help companies send targeted advertisements to consumers.

Since Zatko was fired by Twitter in January, he is in no position to describe company behavior since the most recent settlement. It is difficult to believe that the $150 million fine will be sufficient to get Twitter to become serious about data protection.

Twitter is not the only tech company with a checkered history in this area. In 2012 Facebook and the FTC settled allegations that the company deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information private and then repeatedly allowed it to be shared and made public. Facebook agreed to change its practices.

As with Twitter, it eventually became clear that Facebook was not completely living up to its obligations. The FTC brought a new action, and in 2019 the company had to pay a penalty of $5 billion for continuing to deceive users about their ability to control the privacy of their data.

The settlement also put more responsibility on the company’s board to make sure that privacy protections are enforced, and it enhanced external oversight by an independent third-party monitor.

Zatko’s allegations may prompt the FTC to seek new penalties against Twitter that go beyond the relatively mild sanctions in the settlement from earlier this year.

The bigger question is whether regulators and lawmakers are willing to find new ways to rein in a group of mega-corporations. The effort in Congress to enact new tech industry antitrust measures seems to have fizzled out for now. Such initiatives need to be revived. We cannot let an industry that plays such a substantial role in modern life think it is above the law.