Twitter account users hand over username and passwords for just about any new online tool or report created by some marketer or programmer.
Would you so easily hand over your password to your email account or the pin to your ATM to see stats?
If you gave your Twitter username and password to a site, if they get hacked or sell off your information, your personal account or worse yet your companies account is toast.
I Hope You Know What You Are Doing!
Each time you give your Twitter username and password to a site you are saying the following:
- I hope that you know how to store my information safely and not a learn in 24 hours coder.
- I hope that you are not a marketer who is looking to sell off my information.
- I hope that there is someway for me to delete my information from your site when im done.
- I hope you dont get hacked.
- I hope you dont store my username and password in plain text in the database.
The worse part of it all is that you can never know if they disposed of your username and password. When was the last time someone gave you their server username and password so you could check?
Don’t be the fool
Nobody like to be taken advantage of, especially when there is a real need for online tools and reports. Fortunately there is an answer to all of this and its called oAuth and Twitter is asking for developers to switch over.
Simply put oAuth is a way for you to give authorization without giving your username and password away. The best part is its easy, encrypted and you can turn off authorization anytime!
When you reach a site that requires your Twitter credentials they should provide you with a link or button that sends you to Twitter for authorization similar to what we offer our Soxialize Members:
Clicking on the link sends you to Twitter where you will be asked if you approve and accept giving either “Read” or both “Read and Update” access to your account:
Once you are done and no longer want to allow the site access to your account, simply “Revoke” the authorization:
oAuth is a great step toward the effort to reduce spam and putting all authorization information on one simple page. This way you don’t lose track of all the sites you joined! Be careful handing out credentials and insist developers use oAuth if they want your business!
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