Jazz Shaw, a contributor at Hot Air and Pajamas Media, repeatedly took to Twitter yesterday to accuse Twitchy of invading its users’ “private information.”
https://twitter.com/#!/JazzShaw/status/177468157940875264
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:
https://twitter.com/#!/michellemalkin/status/177468402863046659
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:
https://twitter.com/#!/JazzShaw/status/177486515834851328
Disappointing.
Disclosure: Malkin founded Hot Air and sold it to Salem Communications in February 2010.
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