It doesn't have to be extremely easy, and it isn't extremely easy at every company. Twitter's security was bad, worse than it should have been for their size/ data footprint.

I do agree that data collection is at the core of the problem, but Twitter really should have done a better job.

Read the article,

No amount of "security" is enough for an actor who wants to do this and has privileged to the data. This is almost impossible to out-engineer, if you think a company like Twitter cannot solve "such an easy problem" you're being naive.

Not really sure what your point is. I did read the article. I didn't comment on TikTok, which would be legally required (and I am sure compliant, although they deny that in the article) to hand data over to the Chinese government. I commented on Twitter, which was hacked by amateurs, and absolutely could have been considerably harder as a target.

My point is, you only need a rogue CTO (most of which have no actual idea of how technology works, i.e. an amateur) and it's over; or you know, any of the 10,000s of engineers currently employed on your favorite FAANG company.

Weird point, I don't really get it.