A new advertising tool is wreaking havoc by exposing users’ data to Elon Musk’s Twitter platform.
The news comes through a new study by researchers that have uncovered the ordeal which might be exposing the likes of various firms, governments, and even users to so many security risks linked to the digital social network.
In October, we saw billionaire Elon Musk acquire the company for a staggering $44 billion and among the various other dilemmas that this deal brought forward, we were able to witness a resource that went unexplored.
There was a whole data collection venture that spanned nearly 70,000 different websites including leading businesses and agencies from the Government. Other entities included the likes of NGOs and universities as well.
And the fact that we’ve got a history of Twitter side by side who has undergone major lapses of users’ privacy and security in recent times, we can’t help but wonder how safe this data could be.
The ad tool in question is dubbed Pixel and it can send firms details about each individual that makes its way to such sites and those users that don’t even have a Twitter account in the first place.
These astonishing revelations come forward from the world of Adalytics which is a leading ad tech company in today’s time. It really went one step ahead and outlined the long list of firms included and that had the FBI and the country’s Homeland Security department listed too as were the likes of healthcare pages and firms like Amazon and Pfizer. The latter have pulled out their advertising ventures from the platform after Musk took over as they felt the app still does send over data of users through this tool.
Through such data sent off to Twitter, various firms are putting their users at immense risk and since Twitter has a long history of mega breaches in data, this is definitely appalling, to say the least.
Remember, one of the leading whistleblowers of the Twitter app had accused the firm of major security lapses. And among the list of tech firms that collect users’ data, Twitter is definitely the one that is outlined to be the most concerning.
The new study found so many web pages not taking imminent precautions to get rid of cyber threats that arise in the form of serious injection attacks. This would enable websites to be hacked if Twitter underwent some sort of compromise. And this is another huge issue altogether because Twitter lacks the right engineering staff to tackle such situations after its massive layoffs in the recent past.
During such attacks, we see the likes of tools from third parties come forward and get compromised, causing an infiltration into the system. It’s a major threat and not likely that such threats arose in the past before.
While the Twitter platform does reserve the right to utilize data that it attains from certain advertisers for the sake of business, these advertisers could allow special settings on the platform that is named Restricted Data Usage. But it’s interesting to note through this study that most sites that use this ad tool don’t have this sort of setting enabled.
Read next: Americans Are the Only Ones Who Don’t Think Social Media Improves Democracy
The news comes through a new study by researchers that have uncovered the ordeal which might be exposing the likes of various firms, governments, and even users to so many security risks linked to the digital social network.
In October, we saw billionaire Elon Musk acquire the company for a staggering $44 billion and among the various other dilemmas that this deal brought forward, we were able to witness a resource that went unexplored.
There was a whole data collection venture that spanned nearly 70,000 different websites including leading businesses and agencies from the Government. Other entities included the likes of NGOs and universities as well.
And the fact that we’ve got a history of Twitter side by side who has undergone major lapses of users’ privacy and security in recent times, we can’t help but wonder how safe this data could be.
The ad tool in question is dubbed Pixel and it can send firms details about each individual that makes its way to such sites and those users that don’t even have a Twitter account in the first place.
These astonishing revelations come forward from the world of Adalytics which is a leading ad tech company in today’s time. It really went one step ahead and outlined the long list of firms included and that had the FBI and the country’s Homeland Security department listed too as were the likes of healthcare pages and firms like Amazon and Pfizer. The latter have pulled out their advertising ventures from the platform after Musk took over as they felt the app still does send over data of users through this tool.
Through such data sent off to Twitter, various firms are putting their users at immense risk and since Twitter has a long history of mega breaches in data, this is definitely appalling, to say the least.
Remember, one of the leading whistleblowers of the Twitter app had accused the firm of major security lapses. And among the list of tech firms that collect users’ data, Twitter is definitely the one that is outlined to be the most concerning.
The new study found so many web pages not taking imminent precautions to get rid of cyber threats that arise in the form of serious injection attacks. This would enable websites to be hacked if Twitter underwent some sort of compromise. And this is another huge issue altogether because Twitter lacks the right engineering staff to tackle such situations after its massive layoffs in the recent past.
During such attacks, we see the likes of tools from third parties come forward and get compromised, causing an infiltration into the system. It’s a major threat and not likely that such threats arose in the past before.
While the Twitter platform does reserve the right to utilize data that it attains from certain advertisers for the sake of business, these advertisers could allow special settings on the platform that is named Restricted Data Usage. But it’s interesting to note through this study that most sites that use this ad tool don’t have this sort of setting enabled.
Read next: Americans Are the Only Ones Who Don’t Think Social Media Improves Democracy
