Attendees at the 2013 New York Comic Con on Thursday found they were sending out tweets about the event. The NYCC has since apologized and shut down the service.
According to Mashable, the issue lay in the NYCC badges for the event. Badges were allowed to be pre-registered, which had radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips built in.
Attendees were also given the opportunity to connect social media accounts to their badges. In doing so, attendees were accidentally giving consent for the NYCC to use their accounts to send out messages as they checked in.
Comic Book Resources writes that then the NYCC sent out realistic looking messages through their Twitters, with such messages as "So much pop culture to digest! Can't. handle. the. awesome. #NYCC."
The organizer, ReedPOP, did ask for permission though, it's just that no one seemed to read the information about connecting badges to their social media accounts.
Since people have been getting upset, a ReedPOP spokesperson came forward and said, "As you may have seen yesterday, there were some posts to Twitter and Facebook issued by New York Comic Con on behalf of attendees after RFID badges were registered."
"This was an opt-in function after signing in, but we were probably too enthusiastic in our messaging and eagerness to spread the good word anout NYCC. We have since shut down this service completely and apologized for any perceived overstep."