You have come across an application on Twitter that will find your level of smartness with a click. You connect it to your Twitter account (using OAuth) and then you suddenly realize that that app has published your score to Twitter as well using your own account.

Such Twitter apps may be rare but they do exist and may sometimes embarrass you.

How to Avoid Surprises on Twitter

If you would like to prevent apps from fiddling with your Twitter stream without asking, the easiest solution would be to not use them at all. That’s however an extreme approach as you’ll then miss a whole lot of other apps that are both nice and useful.

The solution is however simple. When you add an app to your Twitter account, you’ll see an authorization page where you can either allow or deny the app access to your Twitter data.

Read the language carefully. If it read something like “the app would like to access and update your data on Twitter,” you are granting the app permission to post to your Twitter stream. Majority of the Twitter apps won’t misuse that privilege but some may.

Therefore, if you are trying out a new app on Twitter that you have never heard of before, it may be a good idea to authorize only the ones that require read-only access to your Twitter data as seen in the screenshot below.

Related: Twitter Tips and Tricks