The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 3, 2011

Official News page 8


REAL LIFE NEWS: YOU MEAN, TWEETS AREN'T A PRIVATE CONVERSATION?

by Hazed

After last week's story about the idiotic woman who tried to hire a hitman on Facebook, this week we find that misunderstanding how privacy and technology don't go together is a universal problem.

A Chinese official who was married embarked on a clandestine affair with another married person. In order to keep in touch, they used a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, so they could follow each other and exchange messages.

What had escaped their notice, however, was that every message was being shared with all other users of the service. All over the world.

It's not like the couple didn't consider ways to keep their affair a secret - one of the tweets from Mr Xie to his mistress asks her to avoid using the phone, and not send him texts, because of worries about being found out.

They just didn't understand the technology of the Twitter-like service and thought their messages would be private. Instead, they built up a following of thousands of people who avidly read their messages about picking up hotel keys and other rendezvous arrangements, as well as various terms of endearments they exchanged.

I wonder how long it was before their respective spouses became aware of this entertaining feed?

Mr Xie's account has now been closed, with a final message saying "sorry". The unnamed mistress is still on the service but wishes to be left alone. Chances of that happening? Not much!

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/21/chinese_public/


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