Sure Twitter started out as a place where people could talk to strangers about anything, but it also found an interesting use: Customer service.
Thanks to how Twitter is structured, it feels quite natural to communicate with brands and it has led to the creation of dedicated teams that provide support to their customers, who are either answered privately in the DMs or on the timeline.
In Kenya, we have seen brands use Twitter effectively to attend to their customers queries and this involves sharing personal data like their account numbers, phone numbers and so on.
This is ought to be handled quite carefully as this data can be used maliciously especially if it has critical details like phone number and physical addresses and such a flaw was unmasked on Twitter.
It all started with a tease 6 months ago.
Since Twitter can get crazy sometimes. For the record @kmarima has my permission. Stay tuned for more details 😊
— igiriwM@ (@Mwirigi) July 10, 2017
Which resulted in a thread posted by @ProverbialKiki about how the Kenyan ISP, Zuku, handles customer details.
A thread about my experiment.. Zuku and Data protection.. cc @ZukuOfficial
— the proverbial kiki (@ProverbialKiki) January 17, 2018
From experience, he says that when you use their customer care hotline and get on phone with a rep, they proceed to give you your details (Full name, residence, phone number and email) without verifying it is actually you.
Anyway the customer care rep asks for your account number and once you give them.. They proceed to read to you your details..
Full name
Residence
Phone numberWithout verifying that it is actually you pic.twitter.com/qcOOXoMcxw
— the proverbial kiki (@ProverbialKiki) January 17, 2018
He decided to perform an experiment. He asked for @Mwirigi‘s permission and decided to dig up his communication with Zuku and found an account number. After calling Zuku, he ended up getting Mwirigi’s phone number, email and residence without verification, which is astounding.
I called zuku.. And.. to cut the long story short.. I was given @Mwirigi's phone.. Email and Residence
No questions asked pic.twitter.com/XJ9ypjtjmR
— the proverbial kiki (@ProverbialKiki) January 17, 2018
That thread should highlight the dangers of sharing sensitive details like your account numbers on the timeline and reserving such content for private conversations with the company. Information custodians such as Zuku may end up being reckless with personally identifiable information that may pose risks of identity theft or even physical security threats.
As a security measure, you may have to search for your correspondence with brands on your social media accounts and delete posts where you shared your sensitive details to prevent a situation where someone might get key information about you.
