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Twitter’s Periscope Faces Its First Security Problem

Twitter followers can see the live stream titles

Mar 31, 2015 14:10 GMT  ·  By
Private media content is not leaked, only its title
   Private media content is not leaked, only its title

Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming app, was launched only last week and it already confronts a security bug that could spell trouble to its users by disclosing the title of the videos intended for private distribution only.

The app, available only for iOS at the moment, is designed for sharing and watching live videos broadcast from the mobile phone, in an effort to make discovering of the world through someone else’s eyes an easier and more direct experience.

Stop tweeting the live streams for a while

The videos can be shared with all the followers on Twitter, thus integrating the content into the platform, or just with a private group, but under certain circumstances, the title of the stream can be leaked to anyone.

In a set of five tweets on Tuesday, Periscope notified its users about the flaw and provided a temporary workaround consisting in disabling the tweeting function; the developers also promised to come up with a fix as soon as possible.

Periscope developers say that having the Tweet option enabled and switching to private broadcast mode causes the app to release the title on Twitter.

They assure that the actual media content remains private and that it is not available outside the defined private group.

Youngsters are the most impacted

However, even if only the text describing the nature of the clip is leaked, this is sufficient reason for concern, since the message may be offensive to someone following the broadcaster on Twitter and this can have an impact on the social relation.

Anything intended to be private should remain so and even partial disclosure of the personal content can have consequences; more so in the case of teenagers, who could become the target of bullying and ridicule from any minor incident.

With a followership of more than 43,000 people, one may think that Periscope’s warning and temporary solution reached the entire intended audience, but tweets often get lost in the feed and unless more direct communication is used, it is very likely that many users are still unaware of the problem.