The Federal Trade Commission and social networking megastar Twitter came to an agreement last week about the need for more consumer security on the site. The FTC’s charges that Twitter “deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk,” stemmed from Twitter hacks in 2009 of high profile accounts including the then-President-Elect Obama and Fox News.

FTC gets LinkedIn…

This is the first FTC ‘faulty data security’ case against a social networking site or service, and the buzz is that this indicates the FTC is linked into the importance and relevance of social networking. In the public statement addressing the settlement, David Vladeck, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC said, “Consumers who use social networking sites may choose to share some information with others, but they still have a right to expect that their personal information will be kept private and secure.”

Stepping Up Security

Twitter announced via their blog that “even before the agreement, [they had] implemented many of the FTC’s suggestions and the agreement formalizes our commitment to those security practices.”

The agreement requires Twitter to establish an information security program that will be assessed by an independent auditor every other year for ten years, and the social networking site is banned for 20 years from “misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information,” as the FTC reports.

The FTC suggestions that Twitter refers to in their post seem to pertain mostly to company-side employee and administrative controls and security procedures, not anything on the user-side. It appears that the hackers were able to gain access to the Twitter accounts by looking in Twitter employee emails, and by breaking a weak administrative password for the site.

Tightened Tweeting?

It’s probably save to assume that there will be some trickle down from the security changes. Now that Twitter has to submit to audits and social networking has gained the attention of the FTC, users may be asked to share more personal information to prove legitimacy, or have to go through more steps to prove tweet authenticity. So will Twitter start tweaking their privacy settings as Facebook has? We’ll have to wait and see…