Has Twitter Stolen Your Identity?

Have you ever had a Twitter account and no matter what you do you can’t recover the password? Your best guess is that mysteriously in the middle of the night Twitter associated your account with a random new password and they forgot to tell you.

Now, you know that Twitter didn’t change your password, but you are also pretty darned sure that you didn’t either.

The worse part is the password recovery process.

Step One:     Send us an email with the email address that you used to open the account.
Step Two:     Read the autoresponse and realize it does not solve your problems.
Step Three:  Wait.
Step Four:    Wait.
Step Five:     Become frustrated and create a new account.

Now you have a piece of you stuck in the ether that you can neither control, nor delete.  Worse your brand may be tied up in that first account, so you are tweeting from a new account that doesn’t really fit the bill.

As you become frustrated, you realize that the customer service for your password recovery was beyond frustrating and you start to search the user supported community.

Once there you find several people that have experienced the same problem, and even the users leave it alone, at best the advice you will get is to get a new account.

Mind you, there is big business in the numbers of users that Twitter purports to having, and it is these users that fuel the money that keeps streaming in the doors, yet you know personally you can account for four of those users that are dead because of password problems.

How many other people suffer this same loss?

The Twitter community on Get Satisfaction shows 216 other people that have asked for help with a password. Considering the user base is in the hundreds of thousands, it makes the 216 look very tiny.

Twitter has a help topic on passwords, which may or may not fit the bill to help you out of your jam, in my case it didn’t for almost a year.  The document states that if you don’t have access to your email account…

“We understand that this can be frustrating, but it’s currently the best way to ensure that your account does not fall into malevolent hands. We’re working on improving the account confirmation process (read this article about it) and hope to avoid this type of situation in the future.”

Funny thing, I do have access to my email accounts, I just can’t get the reset of the password to work.  Now, I have tried over several months, I have filed several tickets, and in general I had given up.

But I still knew that it was my brand, and even though I had given up, it was a temporary state.  I went right back to it, and started the process over.

As I struggled through this process I had to ask, if Twitter doesn’t respond does it mean that they are liable for identity theft or in the case of a business account infringement of my intellectual property rights?

When you are faced with an account that you don’t have access to it is easy to start referring to it as a hijacked account, even though it is just sitting there and no malicious activity has taken place.

Therein lies the key, no malicious activity.  When your account is for all intents and purposes dormant, even if Twitter does not respond to your customer service request in a timely manner, there really is no foul.

Don’t get me wrong if your account is not dormant than by all means continue shouting at the tops of mountaintops and do seek the counsel of a good IP lawyer.

For my case, I continued to try, know thing that the account was in no jeopardy of being truly hijacked, just a pride issue that I wanted the account back.

Finally, it worked!

As Twitter improves its offerings, refines the software, and stabilizes its processes users are sure to hit some rough patches.  However, if you stick to it, and continue to fight to get your brand back, the community outcries will be heard and addressed.  Twitter is very aware that password recover needs help, and that is why they have written several articles on it.

In general, it is important to make sure that if you don’t have access to an account that has your brand tied up that it is your persistence that will get it back.  Since then I have been using software, such as Last Pass to keep me all straight.  I find that as I increase my presence online, my password list continues to grow as fast as the national debt and keeping track of them has become a nightmare.