Blogger falsely accuses Twitchy of privacy abuses

Twitchy is incredibly invasive, privacy wise, and I've not yet figured out what they're using to raid your private information w/o asking

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) March 7, 2012

Jazz Shaw, a contributor at Hot Air and Pajamas Media, repeatedly took to Twitter yesterday to accuse Twitchy of invading its users’ “private information.”

@ThePajamaPundit This application is raiding personal data like a mo-fo and I can't make a match as to where it's stealing it yet.

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) March 7, 2012

Shaw posted these allegations to his several thousand Twitter followers before speaking to anyone at Twitchy.

Twitchy founder/CEO Michelle Malkin asked Shaw what he was talking about:

@JazzShaw I'm right here. What are you talking about and what do you want to know.

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) March 7, 2012

In a subsequent e-mail to Malkin, Shaw stated that he believed Twitchy was improperly harvesting search terms entered into our site’s search bar.

There is no truth whatsoever to Shaw’s allegations. Here is a statement from Twitchy’s lead developer at 10up (the fabulous company that built our site):

This is browser behavior if they have form autofill/remember turned on. There is absolutely nothing being stored by Twitchy when they enter terms in the search form or any other undisclosed data-mining (comments are an obvious example of data that is entered and used), and frankly, I probably would have refused to build it as such.

So the culprit was Shaw’s browser, not anything Twitchy was doing.

Malkin forwarded our developer’s statement to Shaw. Did he run a correction? Did he run a retraction? Did he apologize?

No. He continued to insinuate that Twitchy is engaging in improper “data mining” even after being informed that this is not the case:

Update on #Twitchy. If you don't want it mining your search history, check to see if you have autofill/remember turned on. Browser function.

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) March 7, 2012

Disappointing.

Disclosure: Malkin founded Hot Air and sold it to Salem Communications in February 2010.