Verizon Support Wants You To Know That Twitter Is A Perfectly Secure Way To Send Them Your Social Security Number

Hoping to have an errant charge resolved, O'Reilly Media author Jonathan Zdziarski recently reached out to Verizon Wireless on Twitter. While Twitter support can help put a friendly face to a massive, often-times unwieldy conglomerate, anyone that has actually interacted with one of these support agents has likely found the quality of these interactions to be decidedly hit or miss. In Zdziarski's case, the Verizon Wireless support agent in question thought it would be perfectly acceptable for him to prove his identity over Twitter, since the platform is such a "secure means of communication":

Seriously. This just happened. pic.twitter.com/odM80wMO4r

- Jonathan Zdziarski (@JZdziarski) July 15, 2015

Except for the fact that's not remotely true. Back in late 2013 in the wake of reports on the NSA's ballooning skulduggery, Twitter claimed they'd start encrypting direct messages, though by 2014 that initiative appears to have been forgotten. As such, what Verizon's calling a "secure means of communication" is about as secure as a safe made out of paper mache and tin foil. When pressed about this lack of secure transit for personal data, Zdziarski was apparently informed that everything was ok, because "most users are ok with it":

Verizon defended asking social security numbers over Twitter "because most customers are OK with it": teaching customers to become victims.

- Jonathan Zdziarski (@JZdziarski) July 16, 2015

Of course "most users" don't know a gigabit from a garrote, so it's not entirely clear that "most people aren't bright enough to know this isn't a good idea" should be used as a security standard moving forward.

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