The greater level of security risks that lie within

Twitter is the new-gen social networking site that was established in 2006. Twitter is more of a micro blogging service than a social networking site. So you wont be playing those funny applications and games like the ones in Facebook and Orkut. In these, even if you don't play, the results of your friends get posted on your profile page. Many people like it but for some it is very annoying. In Twitter you don't have these. One more drawback about the usual social networking sites is the amount of friends that a person can have. Again, Twitter doesn't have it. Apart from these, the messages or tweets (as it is called) you post are sent to your friends or followers (the technical jargon yet again) mobile phones.

A host of clients are available for you to tweet from your mobile phone to chat client to even the address bar of the browser. Because of these features, Twitter has become the buzz word of the internet and presently has more than 100 million users. And what's more interesting about Twitter is that several celebrities from across the world right from Barack Obama to the most recent addition, the cricket God Sachin Tendulkar are on it. They can communicate directly with their fans and hence majority of the gossips that surround a celebrity are broken. Majority of these celebrities tweet right from their Blackberry mobile phone using an application called UberTwitter. This is one terrific and handy application for Twitter as it provides amazing freedom and comfort. However, there is a grave security issue associated with this. Whenever a person tweets using this application, their present location gets recorded and is displayed in that person's page. For example, bollywood actor Deepika Padukone uses this application and below is a screenshot for her home page.

When you look on the right side pane on the page, the first thing you note is that bright tick mark. It means that the person is actually the real celeb and not some hoax account. The next thing is the name and followed by it is location. This is of our interest. What is displayed here is the exact latitude and longitude position of the person when he posted it using UberTwitter. Now I copied this and simply pasted it in Google Maps and lo! The result I get is

This is one security issue which I would like to point out. This information can be misused by anyone from a terrorist to anyone with an intention to harm. By using this, the entire privacy of the particular person is compromised. It would be nice if either the developers of UberTwitter or the officials of Twitter look into this issue and resolve it.

- Harish.R