Twitter hands over personal details of @Skype registrant to Skype

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Mike Butcher is a journalist, broadcaster and commentator. He is firstly editor of TechCrunch Europe, but has also co-founded TechHub.com and Coadec.com in Europe as ventures to support the tech startup eco-system. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman.... → Learn More

Of course, we know that Twitter names are something of a Wild-West environment right now. Anyone can grab a famous person’s name or brand, and there is not much policing going on. After all, it would be almost impossible to police. But until now most thought that rogue accounts, once identified, would simply get shut down or perhaps just shut off and transferred to their rightful owner without too much fuss. But, in what appears to be a new move, Twitter is handing out the personal details of people who register brand names on the micro-blogging service to big companies, without alerting the original registrant or performing any kind of standard due diligence. The move raises huge issues for the site, where Twitter names are increasingly being treated like domain names – but unlike domains there is, thus far, no kind of recourse to any kind of domain resolution system.

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