UNITED STATES: Elon Musk’s Twitter is being blasted yet again for its poor privacy policies. According to media reports, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and members of Congress have been notified by a former Twitter employee that “GodMode” can still be enabled by the company’s engineer.
Twitter under fire for internal application GodMode
According to a report, “a new Twitter whistleblower has emerged, corroborating last year’s bombshell testimony about the dismal situation of the business’s privacy protections and alleging the company continues to violate its legal obligations under new owner Elon Musk.”
GodMode is an internal application that gives users access to any Twitter account and lets them tweet from that account. A complaint against GodMode was submitted to the FTC in October of last year by the nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid.
Former employees are being questioned by the law firm. Included in these interviews is the most recent whistleblower report.
The disputed code was shown in screenshots in the complaint. The capitalized comment “THINK BEFORE YOU DO THIS” may be seen in the program line, as shown in the screenshot.
Twitter security issues initially surfaced in 2020. In the mentioned year, the microblogging service was hacked by young cryptocurrency scammers, who used the accounts of some notable people to make false tweets.
President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Apple, Kanye West, and others were among the accounts.
The management of the company later claimed that the problem had been resolved and that a “complete information security program that is reasonably designed to preserve the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic customer information” had been put in place.
The existence of GodMode, according to the latest complaint, “is yet another illustration that Twitter’s public representations to users and investors were incorrect and/or misleading.” The statement continues, “Our client has a reasonable conviction that the information in this disclosure reveals legal infractions by Twitter.”
The whistleblower claimed that the program’s goal was to enable Twitter workers to tweet on behalf of advertisers who were unable to do so themselves in an anonymous interview with The Post.
However, developers altered the program’s name to “privileged mode” in response to internal complaints about it.
The Post’s most recent article supports allegations made by Peiter Zatko, the former chief of Twitter security, who testified last year and made broad assertions.
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