Twitter recently settled charges with the government that it "deceived customers" and didn't protect their personal information, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The complaint against the Internet giant said that there were "serious lapses" in the company's data security, which allowed hackers to take administrative control over the site several times between January and May 2009.

The FTC brought charges against various companies on 30 occasions for weak data security. But this is the first time Twitter has been targeted, or any social network for that matter.

In January 2009, a hacker used a password guessing tool to figure out Twitter's administrative password, which was "a weak, lowercase, common dictionary word." The hackers then accessed tweets that users had set to private. They sent fake tweets from nine accounts, including Barack Obama and Fox News.

One a second occasion, hackers were able to access the personal email accounts of Twitter employees. "Put simply, we were the victim of an attack and user accounts were improperly accessed," Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter's general counsel, said in a statement.

The FTC stated that Twitter was attacked because the company "failed to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized control of its system," including forcing its employees to choose hard-to-guess passwords and suspending accounts after multiple attempts at guessing the wrong password.


I wasn't surprised that Twitter was sanctioned by the government for its business practices. I've always wondered why Twitter tends to fail in the middle of the day, in large part because the company can't handle all of its web traffic. I openly wonder if the company was even remotely prepared to have success on the scale it has achieved thus far. I personally use my Twitter account on a regular basis, and Twitter has become a favorite for millions of people around the world looking to get information out in one or two sentences.

I've also wondered how Twitter actually makes money. My guess is, at this point, they don't make much money and are operating off their initial venture capital. At some point, however, they are going to be asked to pay the piper and find ways to monetize the massive traffic they are receiving. Some options might be paid advertising, premium accounts, or charging for downloads of Twitter apps to cell phones. Either way, the company that isn't making money, doesn't have good security and keeps crashing in the middle of the day isn't one that appears to be prepared for the long haul of web success.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.