Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Care About Internet Privacy? Then Prove It

The issue isn't about Facebook or Twitter. It's about web users' personal responsibility.

May 9, 2018 at 2:00 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

It’s in the user’s hands.
Photographer: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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Millions of people received an email from Twitter last week advising them to change their password. Apparently a bug allowed some employees inside the company to see users’ passwords in plain text, creating the possibility that private information could be compromised.

I received this email, read it and promptly deleted it. I forgot all about it until the subject came up by chance in a conversation with a colleague the next day.