Fry roasts Plaxo in Twitter hissy fit

02-12-2009

by Ralph Averbuch

Stephen Fry is livid his personal details were made public; but he put them online in the first place.

Enthusiastic amateur gadget fanatic, arch twitterer, comedian and polymath Stephen Fry, is widely lauded as one of the most influential people online today. There may be some truth in this claim, given that well over a million people now follow his 140 character musings via Twitter. But it may be that the numbers are starting to get to him. Recently he threatened to quit Twitter in a fit of pique when one follower commented that his tweets were “boring”. That’s now water under the proverbial, but Fry has bounced back into the digital frontline once again, claiming that his personal details, namely his mobile and home address, were being illegitimately made public by another service called Plaxo. His tweet on the matter stated: “I've got the hell out of Plaxo which was distributing my details to every casual passerby. Grrrrr.” For those unfamiliar with Plaxo, it’s an online address book and social network type service which claims over 20 million users worldwide. Fry, presumably after having used the service for a while ‘discovered’ that it was making his personal details (ones he’d obviously entered into the service himself) openly available. Plaxo responded denying it had done anything wrong and suggesting that it was more likely Fry had simply not been careful enough with his own privacy settings. We shall never know which claim is fact, but it once again highlights just how public we are all becoming. The boundaries between our private and public personas becomes ever more hazy over time, to the point where the amount of information that can be gathered about us provides easy pickings for people intent on stealing your identity for the latest online scam. Whoever was in the wrong in this instance, Fry’s latest spat should remind us lesser mortals to be extra–vigilant about what we say, do and post about ourselves on social networking services.

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