Twitter is recently being investigated through the Federal Trade Commission for improperly authorizing the use of email addresses and customer phone numbers to target advertisements.
Twitter announced the investigation, which was first reported through the New York Times, at a presentation by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. On Tuesday, the FTC showed Consumer Reports that it had an open investigation on Twitter, but the firm did not give additional details.
The consumer contact form is collected through Twitter for security reasons, adding two-factor authentication, which requires anyone who logs into an account to enter a form of identification for the time being, such as a one-time access code. This is for consumers of hackers.
The company said last fall that some of the data “could have been inadvertently used” to allow advertisers to target other people’s express types for marketing messages. The challenge would have persisted from 2013 to 2019.
In the SEC file, Twitter says it won a draft FTC complaint expired last month. Misuse of knowledge may put Twitter in violation of a 2011 FTC consent order, which arose from two incidents in 2009 in which hackers were able to take administrative data from Twitter and gain access to customers’ personal information, as well as send fake tweets. customer accounts.
The FTC at the time accused the incidents being caused by “serious deficiencies” in Twitter’s data security. Under the terms of the resulting regulation, Twitter has been prohibited for 20 years from misleading consumers on the extent to which it protects the security and confidentiality of their information. And there is a need for a comprehensive virtual security program that can be independently audited over the next decade.
Ignoring such types of warnings can result in FTC fines. And, as a result of the ongoing investigation, Twitter says it could face fines totaling between $150 million and $250 million.
Twitter was recently criticized for its knowledge security practices after hackers controlled to take the accounts of several prominent people, adding Barack Obama, Kanye West, Joe Biden and Jeff Bezos as a component of a Bitcoin scam. A Florida teenager was recently charged with 30 felonies in the attack.
And Twitter is the only social network that has its knowledge security practices reviewed through the FTC. In 2019, Facebook paid a $5 billion fine to the FTC to resolve customer privacy charges.
I write about everything that is “cyber” and your right to privacy. Before I joined Consumer Reports, I spent 16 years working for The Associated Press. What I love: cooking and learning to code with my children. I have lived in the Bronx for over a decade, however, as a proud Native Michigan, I will be an avid fan of the Detroit Tigers, no matter how much they harass me and my circle of relatives at Yankee Stadium. Follow me on Twitter (@BreeJFowler).