Twitter should stay far from the madding cloud

I am no Luddite. I own an iPhone, an iPad and a creaky old iMac on which I bang out columns. I am totally wired and that has led me to a conclusion about our online world, at least as presently constructed: computers are for kids.

If you want to play games, pressure your peers, look up stuff for school, buy shoes, see new places, meet someone on a street, flirt, find romance, view pornography or reveal opinions that you - and only you - could have formed, our friends in Silicon Valley are making life far easier than it has ever been.

But if you are doing something adult - something with financial implications, for example - it still makes sense in many cases to stay offline; far from the cloud and its madding crowd. The traditional means of communication, such as speech and ink on paper, have their virtues: security among them.

The latest evidence comes from an unlikely source: Twitter, the social network that allows all of God's children with internet access to communicate in dispatches of up to 140 characters (and where you can follow me @GaryRSilverman).

Last Tuesday Twitter was hoist with its own petard, as people used to say when they sat through five-act plays. It had planned to reveal its first-quarter earnings after the US stock markets closed at 4pm New York time. But nearly an hour earlier a company called Selerity tweeted the Twitter results.

The numbers were bad, and Twitter shares plunged. By the time the market closed, the company had lost nearly a fifth of its value, blind-siding any investor who had planned their day around the scheduled announcement.

Blame for the snafu was shouldered by Shareholder.com, a Nasdaq unit that manages Twitter's shareholder relations website. It said it "inadvertently posted" the results for all of 45 seconds, enabling Selerity, which trawls the internet for financial data, to find the information and reveal it to the world three seconds before 3.08pm.

But this sort of accident is becoming commonplace in our financial world. Last October, JPMorgan Chase results were released hours early because of what Nasdaq called a "human error" at Shareholder.com. At that time, Reuters compiled a list of a half dozen similar cases this decade - including one in which Selerity obtained Microsoft's earnings an hour before they were supposed to be issued.

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Remember: we only learnt about the Twitter earnings leak because Selerity tweeted the data. It could have just traded on the results without anyone knowing any better. Enterprising computer hackers pose another threat. Whoever it was that leaked those embarrassing Sony Pictures Entertainment emails last year knew how to outfox corporate cyber-security officials. What could stop such people from gleaning market-moving information and calling their brokers?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. As crazy as it might sound in our high-tech world, we could go back to using paper. The process would be more secure if earnings reports were typed by secretaries or printed on presses, and then distributed in locked rooms to reporters or other interested parties.

Stealing information under this system would require rogue actors to change out of their pyjamas and do things like breaking into buildings or cracking open safes. In other words, it wouldn't be easy. If President Richard Nixon were alive today, he could tell you all about the difficulties involved in even a third-rate burglary.

Inside jobs would still be possible, if only because secretaries, printers and even some reporters, from what I hear, have friends, too. But they would be harder to pull off, since the pool of potential miscreants would be smaller and easier to observe.

Of course, the capital markets could become less fun for high-speed traders. But so be it. I never understood the economic rationale for investments lasting nanoseconds, anyway. Perhaps the flash boys should find real jobs and play their computer games in their spare time.

For the rest of us, the order of the day should be to sort out which activities are best done online and which are not. If we look back, mid-course corrections of this sort have been made with other technologies - such as the automobile.

When cars were the coolest thing going, Americans wanted to do everything in them: procreate, watch feature films and eat dinner. I was a boy during those days and I remember devouring countless hamburgers in our family's Volkswagen. It was fun but kind of messy. Try as I might, I could never figure out how to eat my burger without dripping ketchup all over the back-seat of my parents' automobile.

Nowadays, that is no longer a problem. My children employ an older technology when eating their burgers: a table. My car stays cleaner as a result - and I think there is a lesson in that.

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