SOCIAL
Twitter Adds New Push Notifications for Suspicious Login Attempts
Twitter’s looking to help keep users better informed of potential account hacking with new push notifications which will be triggered whenever login attempts from new devices are detected.
We’re making it easier for you to keep your account secure and spot potential attempts to compromise it. Starting today, we’ll send push notifications in addition to emails for any suspicious logins to your account.
For more information:https://t.co/5oD2QvK2dS
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 19, 2019
As explained by Twitter:
“If we detect a suspicious login or when you log in to your Twitter account from a new device for the first time, we will send you a push notification within the Twitter app, or via email as an extra layer of security for your account. Login alerts are only sent following new logins through Twitter for iOS and Android, twitter.com, and mobile web.”
The alerts will enable you to confirm that it was, in fact, you who logged in on the new device, or to take relevant reporting action if it wasn’t – though it seems odd, based on this wording at least, that Twitter would send those notifications via, potentially, the app through which you’ve just logged in. Ideally, the push notification would come through the app if a login attempt is made on an alternate device, or via email when someone logs in via the app, etc.
The addition seems like a good, simple way to improve account security, – though it could also be problematic for those using incognito mode:
“If you log in to your Twitter account from incognito browsers or browsers with cookies disabled, you will receive an alert each time.”
Ideally, there’ll be a simple way to switch these off, with a new toggle added to Twitter’s push notifications options – which, of course, you can control via your app permissions anyway, if you want to cut them off entirely.
With Twitter working to address its issues with bots, and improve on-platform engagement, new additions like this help to add to that capacity, providing more ways to keep user accounts safe, and the platform, more generally, free of manipulation.