4 crore rupees fine on Twitter over bug that made some private tweets public

New Delhi : Ireland has imposed a major fine on micro-blogging site Twitter. Ireland’s data regulator has imposed a fine of 4,50,000 euros, or about four crore rupees, on Twitter. This fine has been imposed on Twitter due to a bug that made many people’s private tweets public. This is the first action taken on an American company under the new European Union data privacy system.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was implemented by the European Union in 2018, and Ireland has taken this action under this GDPR. It is also being said that this is the first action on Twitter under GDPR. Last year, there was a bug in Twitter’s Android app, after which private tweets of many users became public. The penalty has been imposed because Twitter was unable to inform its users about the bug with immediate effect.

On the other hand, Twitter has said in a statement that this bug came during the Christmas holidays in the year 2018 and most of the employees were on holiday, so it was late to inform the users about it. We take full responsibility and are committed to protecting the data and privacy of our users. It will be our endeavour to inform the users first if any such problem arises. Twitter also apologized for this bug in the year 2019.

Significantly, this Twitter bug was identified in January 2019. Due to this bug, users setting ‘Protect Your Tweet’ in their account from 3 November 2014 to 14 January 2019 were affected, however this bug only affected Android users.