A previously undisclosed government-ordered audit of Twitter Inc.’s privacy and data controls missed failures later exposed by a whistleblower -- raising questions about oversight of major technology platforms.
The 2021 external audit, obtained by Bloomberg News in response to a public records request, concluded that the company had appropriate safeguards. Months later, the company’s cybersecurity chief had left and alleged that Twitter’s practices were marred by “egregious deficiencies.”
Ernst & Young LLP certified that Twitter’s information security program was appropriate for the company’s size and that its “security controls meet or exceed the protections required” by the US Federal Trade Commission under a 2011 consent decree. The whistleblower, Twitter’s ex-head of cybersecurity, Peiter Zatko, filed a complaint and testified before Congress earlier this year saying that the company was a “ticking bomb of security vulnerabilities.”
It’s not the first time that an FTC-ordered audit has neglected to uncover security weaknesses. FTC-ordered audits of Meta Platforms Inc.’sFacebook in 2015 and 2017 failed to identify the problems with the social media company that led to the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Uber Technologies Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are also subject to FTC orders.
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