ING Direct Canada wants you to publish your banking fees and charges to the world. They've launched an official Twitter application today called Fee Tweeter to help you do just that. The intention is perhaps a harmless one, to get Canadians to publicly cry out against the over use of service fees, but if there were ever two accounts in the world that should never, ever meet it's your banking and Twitter accounts.

Missing from the Fee Tweeter site is a rather important reminder, a warning that Twitter is indeed the most public of forums, the most exposing of domains. There is no delete key, no undo option, no take backs. Once you send a message out, it's there for anyone to find and read. In this case Fee Tweeter itself will grab that message and publish it on their own Twitter feed.

At issue isn't so much what ING is asking for, knowing how much you're charged for processing a cheque isn't going to compromise your account, but the issue is what they might get. A little bit of confusion, someone trying to copy and paste from their bank account, and people might choose, by accident or confusion, to publish details that could deliver access. ING's application doesn't require you to have a Twitter account to use it, they've supplied a guest account so that even those who have never heard of Twitter can post their banking fees to the service.

There may be no technical link between ING's application and your bank account, but they are creating a psychological one. With the seal of approval of their brand, they are saying that "some" information from your banking account is "safe" to publish, when the responsible rule is that no information all at is safe for publishing. That's the kind of social engineering vulnerability that scammers like to exploit.