Privacy issues raised as Twitter employee hands over personal details of @Skype registrant to Skype

Of course, we know that Twitter names are something of a Wild-West environment right now. Anyone can grab a famous person’s name or brand and there is not much policing going on. After all, it would be almost impossible to police. But until now most thought that rogue accounts, once identified, would simply get shut down or perhaps just shut off and transferred to their rightful owner without too much fuss. But, in what appears to be a new move, Twitter is handing out the personal details of people who register brand names on the micro-blogging service to big companies, without alerting the original registrant or performing any kind of standard due diligence. The move raises huge issues for the site, where Twitter names are increasingly being treated like domain names - but unlike domains there is, thus far, no kind of recourse to any kind of domain resolution system.

Not long after Twitter launched, Stephanie Robesky of Atomico, the venture fund established by the former founders of Skype, registered @Skype while still at the company. But, she says in a blog post yesterday, she forgot about the move, only to be reminded of it after she realised a Twitter employee had handed out her name, email address and contact details to someone at Skype who then contacted her.