A Twitter account being hacked is now an unfortunately ‘normal’ occurrence, at least in so far as that when we hear of it we are no longer as shocked or surprised as we were say a year or two ago. However, as yesterday’s hacking of the Associated Press‘s Twitter account showed, just a single 140 character update can have a significant effect almost instantaneously.

Before we discuss this story it’s worth quickly pointing out that Twitter is currently beefing up its security with the implementation of two-factor authentication in an effort to combat would-be hackers.

So yesterday the AP’s Twitter account was hacked, and the following message was posted, purportedly telling of an attack on the White House:

Unsurprisingly the original tweet was deleted (so we’ve had to borrow this screen-grab from the Mashable article) as soon as the breach became apparent, and the account was suspended before another AP account clarified the siutation. However, the impact of the tweet was being felt by the financial markets almost immediately. The Standard & Poors 500 Index dropped sharply by around one percent before bouncing back, with the trough representing a temporary dip in value of $136 billion.

If someone had been privy to the knowledge that such a tweet was to be sent and at what time, there could have been significant gains to be made by selling high (before the tweet) and buying low after the price dropped in reaction to the report from a ‘trustworthy’ source that the White House had been attacked and the President injured. Of course there could have been no guarantee that the markets would react in the way that they did.

The Syrian Electronic Army – a group claiming to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – has taken responsibility for the attack, as well as saying that it is behind other recent attacks on the Twitter feeds of Agence France Presse news agency, Sky News Arabia, al-Jazeera mobile and CBS News.

Everywhere you go in the world, you will find that people’s understanding and tolerance of things will vary hugely. It might be social customs such as how much clothing people need wear, whether or not you leave food on a plate, or how you address a member of the opposite sex. The same principle can be applied to what happens online, and what the limits are on a person’s privacy expectations.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that certain countries react with more volatility than others when changes are made to Facebook’s privacy settings. And now, following the release of her book Lean In, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has admitted that there is a significant difference in the levels of acceptance between America and other countries in Europe, she insists that Facebook does care as much about privacy as anyone:

“I believe there is a perception and fear that because we are American, we don’t take privacy as seriously as Europeans do. We feel this most acutely in Germany… If there is a single American who cares as much about privacy — just one — as someone in Germany, then we have to understand it.”

Despite her suggestion that a lot of the fear associated with changes to Facebook’s privacy settings stems from the fact that the technology is still relatively new, it is nice to finally have an acknowledgement from Sandberg that these changes are often too complicated and confusing for the users:

“Our biggest mistake over the years was not one of violating privacy, but was one of complexity. There is this tension in privacy between control and ease of use. You can give people a lot of control and it is very complicated, or you can give people less control and it is easier to use. Facebook has historically given people tons of control, but then it was all on privacy pages with 40 things, and it was hard to understand.”

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s privacy settings? Are they too complicated to allow for meaningful sharing, forcing you into restricting what you share too harshly through fear that something might slip through the net? Or do people need to be more educated in their online sharing habits?