A Twitter bug allowing anyone to read the private tweets with a simple Google search query has been found. The L.A time has just a while ago reported this serious bug. It is not really anything so technical or dangerous but is simply that Twitter forgot to disallow access of private tweets to Google Bot.

As you already know, some people prefer to make their tweets private and as such only people they allow to follow them are able to read their tweets. I perfectly agree to this as even on one (don’t bother about it) of my Twitter account I need it to be in private mode due to some sensitive information shared.

However the Google bot is able to access these tweets and even index it. Take for example the tweets of Bill Clinton which is private. However if you go to Google and type:

site:twitter.com/billclinton

This is what you will see as shown below:

Serious problem isn’t it? So who is at fault? Twitter or Google? In my opinion it is Twitter who is at fault as there is a way to tell the Google bot to not index some part of its website. This can be a very serious issue even though being just a simple query to find it.

So what can be done? Nothing instantly! First Google will have to remove those index but Twitter will also have to customized it’s indexing. Meanwhile anyone can view the tweets of anyone who is on Private mode.

Update: After some thought, I think Twitter is not really liable. While rechecking these results using Google Time Filters, I could not get any result for the last week or last day. I then tried testing the query on BNO CEO twitter account which is private too. As expected his results is only until he decided to make his twitter account private. So this bug mentioned by LA Time (Mashable too) can be just a normal indexing of tweets before the respective Twitter users decided to make their account private.

Will be good to wait for Twitter’s reply about this however since the buzz is already spreading across the Twitter Sphere.

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