It's been barely a day since some anonymous hackers dumped a stack of 700 million email Ids and passwords on the Internet and now, a report has emerged that a bug in Twitter has exposed Android users' private tweets to the public for several years.
Twitter confirmed the news in a press note that the protected tweets exchanged between the users and the followers were made public for four years from November 2014 to January 2019.
"We've become aware of an issue in Twitter for Android that disabled the "Protect your Tweets" setting if certain account changes were made. You may have been impacted by this issue if you had protected Tweets turned on in your settings, used Twitter for Android, and made certain changes to account settings such as changing the email address associated with your account between November 3, 2014, and January 14, 2019," Twitter said.
The company apparently uncovered the bug this month and fixed it on January 14. The worrying issue is that Twitter doesn't have an exact number of users affected.
However, on the bright side, the company has been able to trace some of the affected people and have been informed of the issue. Also, the "Protect your Tweets" option is now live on Android version, which was previously turned off.
It can be noted that Apple iPhone owners need not be concerned about this issue, as this is limited to Android version only.
As of now, there is no word on if the affected Android users received threats by online bullies.
