Look, journalists / bloggers / reporters / rumormongers, if you’re going to share some breaking news via an undisclosed source, don’t bother to obscure the source’s name while still giving tons of clues that makes it easy to figure out who that person is.

Engadget, I’m talking specifically to you at the moment. In this breaking news story yesterday, you so kindly obscured the person’s Twitter ID (presumably to protect her identity), but you made it ridiculously simple for anyone to figure out who tweeted that message about an upcoming iPhone feature.

You not only showed her Twitter picture, but you gave everyone the exact Tweet text which is easily searchable, so figuring out who she is was inevitable.

The poor gal in question apparently had to delete her Twitter account because of this, but you can still see what that Twitter account looked like via a cache of the page. (Screenshot here for when the cache disappears).

My guess is that this might seriously hurt her chances of getting the gig as well. (The same article did the same thing to another person, but one example is enough, I think).

Obviously, we all have to think before we share things online, so I’m not really ranting about the fact that poor Vi’s tweet got spread to the masses via Engadget. She put it out there, so where it ends up after that is fair game, I suppose. But if you’re writing a story and purposely trying to protect someone’s identity by obscuring the name, don’t bother giving away all the necessary clues that will make that protection meaningless.

Two Rant Takeaways:

1. What you share online can come back to haunt you. Think before you share.
2. If your goal is to protect the identity of someone you are writing about, for pete’s sake, do it right.

*Note 1: I figure the damage is already done since Engadget has about 10 bazillion times more readers than I do, so my pointing this out won’t make it any worse.

*Note 2: Thanks to @mvandemar for the awesome P.I. investigative work and tip.