Twitter’s online safety account tweeted an alert yesterday that warns users of UberSocial and Twidroyd users of a potential privacy problem. According to the tweet, direct messages that are longer than 140 characters and are sent via the “d username” method are visible publicly. This glitch reportedly effects UberSocial for Blackberry and iPhone as well as Twidroyd for Android.
UberMedia responded to the problem and confirmed in a blog post that the issue has been fixed. The problem was the result of these two clients relying on TMI.me and Twitlonger to shorten messages that exceed Twitter’s 140 character message limit. The issue was fixed on the server-side and does not require any intervention by UberSocial or Twidroyd users. Users that adhere to the 140 character limit send their message using Twitter’s API and were not vulnerable to this problem. While it is never pleasant to read of a privacy glitch such as this, UberMedia should be recognized for addressing and fixing the problem within hours of its discovery.