The most recent Lawyer2Lawyer pod­cast had guest appear­ances by @KevinOKeefe and @ScottGreenfield con­cern­ing the use of twit­ter by lawyers.

Kevin had requested ques­tions or con­cerns peo­ple had with twit­ter, and the first thing that popped into my mind was over­shar­ing. I’m obvi­ously not talk­ing about when you give too many graphic details at the din­ner table; rather, when you share infor­ma­tion regard­ing what you are work­ing on.

I recently vol­un­teered to help do research on a case. (As an aside, this is the first bit of prac­ti­cal legal expe­ri­ence I am get­ting. To give credit where due, I was referred to the attor­ney through my law school. One of my pro­fes­sors men­tioned — in pass­ing — that he knew some­one who was look­ing for help and I approached the pro­fes­sor after class to get the attorney’s con­tact infor­ma­tion.) In my excite­ment to be work­ing on some­thing real, I twit­ted the gen­eral issue I was research­ing. Before I hit the “tweet” but­ton, how­ever, I hes­i­tated. How much infor­ma­tion does some­one really need to piece together the rest of the picture?

That started me think­ing about the pos­si­ble pit­falls of twit­ter in gen­eral — the biggest one being the com­pla­cency we fall into when there is a per­cep­tion of secu­rity. Pass­word breaches aside, twitter’s “direct mes­sage” fea­ture poses a huge risk for peo­ple hop­ing to direct mes­sage sen­si­tive, con­fi­den­tial or pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions. If some­one uses the wrong for­mat in send­ing the mes­sage, even if it’s only a sin­gle char­ac­ter dis­crep­ancy, the pri­vate mes­sage is posted for the entire globe to read.

I hardly ever use the SMS func­tion­al­ity to update my twit­ter sta­tus, yet I still allow SMS noti­fi­ca­tion of direct mes­sages. When I tried to respond to some­one with my email address I com­pletely failed to pref­ace my mes­sage with a “d”, thereby pub­lish­ing my per­sonal email address for all to see. For­tu­nately I’m a nobody, so I’m safe and unhassled.

Pri­vacy Dis­as­ter At Twit­ter: Direct Mes­sages Exposed (Update: GroupTweet Is Likely Culprit)

dm fail!

There are a myr­iad of arti­cles on how to use twit­ter (some days it seems that’s all any­one ever writes about. And it’s not as if each arti­cle is chock-full of orig­i­nal infor­ma­tion…) and many of them sug­gest that you use the direct mes­sage func­tion rather than @replies so as not to over­bur­den the poor peo­ple who vol­un­tar­ily asked to be shown your every last fleet­ing thought. This the­ory works hand-in-hand with the the­ory that twit­ter is a use­ful way to com­mu­ni­cate with cowork­ers, as a sort of mass IM mech­a­nism. I think that it’s safe to assume that your com­mu­ni­ca­tions with your cowork­ers will include priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion. Try to remem­ber that unless you very, very care­fully direct mes­sage some­one, the infor­ma­tion is know­able to any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion. Or peo­ple sit­ting next to some­one with an inter­net connection.

I don’t mean to harp on twit­ter — the issue is the same with all social media:
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I sim­ply feel that the nature of twit­ter more eas­ily lends itself to be misused.