If you thought Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) would encrypt your private messages soon, think again. In November, it was announced that Twitter was working on keeping private messages secure to help thwart hackers and the government. Unfortunately, the project was dropped recently, with no reason given. Even employees, working on the project, for confused by the sudden shift.
Although most of Twitter’s information is public, you can use their direct messaging system or protect your tweets to give you more privacy over your messages. While Twitter declined to comment about its production halt, it may have more to do with Twitter being overwhelmed at the moment as opposed to not wanting to move forward with the encryption process.
As it stands, Twitter has been working on modifying its messaging system for a while. Investing in encryption may put more on Twitter’s plate than they can handle at the moment. Of course, that is only speculation.
A few Twitter insiders believe the encryption won’t be implemented until the last quarter of this year. It seems a stunning move for a company that is perceived as standing strong against government data requests. Twitter was one of the few tech companies who refused to take part in PRISM, which was a national security program that gave the government free reign to sort through data as they saw fit.
Furthermore, Twitter has fought against government-issued gag orders and subpoenas, led by Twitter’s principles as well as the companies’ former head lawyer, Alex Macgillivray. With PRISM, the government was able to secretly view email address contacts and instant messages from Yahoo!, Gmail and other email services. In addition, the government could glean information from Google and Yahoo! data centers, easily.
Nonetheless, even though Twitter is shelving encryption, for now, it is still working on maintaining some privacy such as encrypting emails to its users. It also enabled a tool that prevents third parties from using private keys to decrypt information. Some Twitter users will fume over having to wait even longer for message encryption. At the same time, other users will probably be too busy tweeting to notice.
