Donald Trump's Twitter account disappeared for several minutes yesterday. Sadly, it didn't mean that Trump had deleted it. No: a Twitter customer support worker deactivated it on his last day at work.
Some of Trump's apologists thought Trump was being censored and instantly started screaming "Freedom of speech! Freedom of speech!"
Sorry. It's Donald Trump who doesn't believe in freedom of speech: he has blocked numerous people from his Twitter feed, including Stephen King, Marina Sirtis, and VoteVets.org.
Does freedom of speech even apply to Twitter? They set the terms of usage. Twitter has a code of conduct and has banned numerous people for threatening physical violence, cyberstalking, cyberbullying and other forms of harassment.
But they claim the right to revoke anyone's account at their discretion. They're a private company. Providing a free service. What possible right can anyone claim to use the resources of a private company?
Donald Trump has violated Twitter's code of conduct numerous times, including threats of nuclear war against North Korea. If there's one person whose Twitter account should be deleted, it's Trump: he is the biggest bully on the planet.
What this incident really shows is that your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple and all the others are completely insecure in the most meaningful sense. Any low-level support person can go in and muck around with your data. Look at your pictures. Read your emails. Delete them. Copy them. Forward them to your wife.
This is of necessity: to provide fast service to resolve problems, a large number of support personnel need access to your accounts. But who are these support personnel? Most are poorly paid phone operators with minimal understanding of the systems they work with. We don't know how they're vetted, how they're trained, how they're monitored. We don't even know what country they work in: many IT support functions are contracted out to giant phone banks in India and the Philippines.
But we trust them with all our data, our deepest secrets.
It's clear that Twitter has no safeguards to stop disgruntled employees from screwing around with your Twitter account. The same thing is almost certainly true for Facebook and Google: thousands of support personnel, programmers, system operators and database administrators have total access to your data. And they need access to do their jobs and provide efficient service.
We are all being conned into putting all our data in "the cloud" so we can always have access to it. The problem is, everyone else has access to it too.
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