Deleting tweet archive

If your intent is to make the entire archive inaccessible, your best bet is probably to unfollow everyone then set your account to private.

If your intent is to delete the entire archive, then deleting the account should achieve the same purpose.

If you do decide to delete your account, I suggest you:
- remove your phone and im from http://twitter.com/devices and
- change the email address in http://twitter.com/account/settings to one that you don't use

If my wish was to delete my account, I'd have said that. My desire is to have a function that is not currently present. Namely, to delete my own archive.

There are several reasons. One of which has to do with the very infancy of all of these technologies in relation to human social history and our lack of any long term knowledge of the changes that such behaviours will introduce into our socialization. At such an early stage, we should have better control over our data. The second concerns the state of the net right now as a giant datamining opportunity and an increasing arena of surveillance and corporate abuses of privacy. There's no question that the makers of these tools are profiting from our free flowing personal data - our day to day experiences, actions, ideas, resources, relationships, demographics and association. There is a lot of room for abuse of this data by governments and corporations alike. If we're going to be RSSing our personal information to untold recipients - thousands of little bites and pieces of our lives - we ought to have some controls.

Right now, if you have an open Twitter account you are also making your life avaiable to be aggregated by any party online. They may gather that data or rebroadcast it elsewhere decontextualised from you, your network or the contexts in which you were broadcasting it.

The response to "delete your account" is fine when directed at a less tech savvy user (unlike myself). To such a user, the notion of having any stake in the systems they use is mystifying. I'm an early adopter to social networks and the technology and philosophies that have accompanied their adoption and use over the past eight years - starting with Orkut and Friendster, into Linkedin and beyond.

Most people's default setting for issues like this is to abide by the terms (usually !@#$ty) they've been given by a developer and find their own way around them. Developers ALWAYS start with the most top down models they can - just to see what they can and cannot get away with. Facebook is a great example of this. This is a philosophy of OPT OUT in the grand sense. Start with the worst model and let the "people" respond. Likely, most late majority users don't see themselves as stakeholders with any sort of voice so they'll accept BAD TOS in principle. Developers - especially the current breed - count on your apathy.

So telling me, "delete your account" represents an apathetic user position - we abide to their rules and their design. It's the standard response of "if you don't like it, shove off" that just reinforces a certain kind of power rather than forcing that power to accommodate and answer to others. It's sort of like democracy that way.

Your point is well taken. No offense was intended in my first reply above.

I see, so you're saying that you'd like to keep your account and simply delete the content it currently contains.

While this tool won't get you a completely fresh start, there already is a tool to delete single "statuses" from your archive:

"Right now, if you have an open Twitter account you are also making your life avaiable to be aggregated by any party online. They may gather that data or rebroadcast it elsewhere decontextualised from you, your network or the contexts in which you were broadcasting it."

I think you've nailed it. Twitter is a public (emphasis on public) medium. Many 3rd parties scan and aggregate its content. These third parties also store that data separately from Twitter itself. Deleting your public archive on Twitter won't hide anything you've already posted there from the Internet. It is the responsibility of users, however naïve, to be aware of the positions in which they place themselves.

People don't generally talk loudly about private matters in crowded public places where others can hear. Why should the Internet, where everything is recorded by one or many servers, be a better place in which to place private information? That goes doubly for a public forum like Twitter, where not only are public messages constantly copied into other 3rd party services, but also sometimes appear on the service's homepage as part of the public timeline.

Cameron, that is so true; I had completely forgotten about other services archiving our tweets.

For example, the various search engines (Tweetscan, Summize, Flaptor, Terraminds, not to mention Google!) all retain a copy of our tweets. Also, people who have opted to receive our tweets via email (e.g., Twittermail will send @replies to the recipients) still retain a copy of those tweets in their inboxes even after we delete our accounts.

It does seem like the best recourse (if we truly wish to avoid having our data copied) is to make our Twitter accounts private.

With all due respect for the workarounds suggested I'm not interested in deleting my account or setting it private to solve a problem that the developers can remedy by providing me with the USER CONTROL I'm asking for. Again, if I wished to delete my account, make it private or unfollow people I would do so. None of these ideas appeals to me. What does appeal to me is to give me a bulk delete/select all function for my tweets. Other services/tools have this, there is no reason Twitter cannot offer it. Sorry, this isn't a matter of scale. I think it's simple resistance to allowing the users to get rid of all that valuable data that these "services" are capitalising on. Look, I know the answer to the question: how do these services make money. You buy and sell our data. So I also know that making it easier for us to remove it likely doesn't appeal to your stakeholders and third party clients who are paying you for access to our content. Thing is, not every user is a dope. Some of us know what is possible and we also know that it makes good business sense for you to consider our needs as well as those of the profiteers of your service.

Warning: long-winded explanation ahead

Twitter will need to do more than just give you the ability to delete or set an expiration date for your archive to give you the user control that you seek.

That's because tweets in the Twitter public timeline are copied and archived by third-party Twitter search engines (e.g., Summize, Tweetscan) in real-time.

By real-time, I mean that literally within seconds of you sending a tweet, a copy of it is stored by Summize, Tweetscan, etc. and that tweet will almost immediately show up in these search engines.

You can try this for yourself by going to Summize, running a search for your user name (without the @), then sending a tweet from your Twitter account while you have the search results page open. You'll see that within seconds, Summize will tell you that there's a new tweet that meets the search criterion and will give you the option to refresh the page to see the new tweet. When you refresh the Summize search results, the tweet that you had just sent will appear on the search results page.

So even if you were to literally delete your tweet from Twitter within seconds of posting it, anyone searching Summize for your user name will still find that tweet. Since Summize is a third-party site that's not owned or controlled by Twitter, they have their own repository. Deleting something from Twitter doesn't delete it from Summize or Tweetscan.

End of long-winded explanation

In light of the above, Twitter will have to add more than just a mass delete or expiration option for you to achieve the level of user control that you're seeking.

Twitter would also need to:

1. Give you the ability to opt out of the public timeline (note: this is different from setting your account to private; you can be out of the public timeline but still have a public web account), since all tweets that appear in the public timeline are archived by the Twitter search engines.

2. Give you the ability to set your user-timeline RSS feed to private, so someone else can't just subscribe to your user-timeline RSS feed and get a copy of your tweets. The only way to do that right now is to set your account to private. Twitter will therefore need to separate the privacy settings for your web account from the privacy settings of your RSS feed.

These enhancements are, unfortunately, not as trivial as making user interface updates that allow users to select-all and delete.

A final note: Even if Twitter were to add the controls or options above, nothing prevents Google or any other company from scraping your public profile page and therefore archiving your tweets in their own private repositories. The additional features above also do not prevent anyone else from going to your Twitter profile page and taking screenshots or performing basic copy-and-paste actions to store copies of your tweets.

MDY - Was it fun to write that?

"These enhancements are, unfortunately, not as trivial as making user interface updates that allow users to select-all and delete."

"Trivial" huh?

It's unfortunate that Get Satisfaction doesn't provide a "feeling smug" smiley - you wear that one really, really well.

First off, I know all about how aggregation, Google cache and etc works. I make my living explaining this stuff to clients and setting up feeds for others. I thought for a moment of linking to some stuff I wrote about aggregation (from four years ago) but I resisted.

Not once, anywhere, in any of the messages above did I talk about what happens to the content *once* it is aggregated.

I'm talking about creating a user setting that effectively throttles the content from being distributed. Perhaps the setting is to make individual tweets private (not DMs but private tweets that go out only to the people in one's network). I'm not really sure how this feature would be defined but that's the job of developers.

Finally, MDY - I didn't come here to debate the value of this idea (via the opinion of other users) I came here to solicit a response from the developers. I surely hope you're not on the Twitter payroll - as condescension never works in any forum.

Since you deigned to lecture me about my knowledge base I thought I'd return the favour and enlighten you on some of the more political dimensions of this discussion - dimensions you are clearly oblivious to:
http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/b...

The next time to deign to give another participant here a lecture on "how technology works" consider your audience.

chandrasutra, I regret that you believe I was being smug, because that wasn't what I was trying to be.

And yes, I do think that adding the select-all-and-delete feature to the Twitter user interface is trivial compared to all the back-end redesign work that they're doing right now.

I wasn't debating the merits of your request, because I would actually like to see it implemented.

Instead, I was attempting (and failing apparently) to expand further on your request. I wanted to demonstrate that it's important to add those other features (opting out of the public timeline, making the rss private), because the select-all-and-delete feature by itself won't be enough to give users control over their tweets.

And no, I don't work for Twitter. If I did, my avatar here would have 'employee' or 'representative' written on it.

Thanks for the link to opensocialweb.org. I will read it.

It's too bad you chose not to link to your own site, as it would be nice for people to also benefit from your extensive body of knowledge online. [I personally don't need the URL since I've already visited and commented on your site before and I know where to find it.]

P.S.
The last thing I want is for someone new to Twitter to read this thread and think that by deleting their tweet archive, they've removed all traces of their content, especially when that's so very much not the case. This was part of my motivation for taking the time to describe how the Twitter search engines work. It was not meant to be an insult to your professional expertise.

I am a green horn who knows nothing of the technology or the potential exploitation of archival files...however, I would like the option of deleting the archive simply to make it more difficult for Twitter users to go back and read my blatherings from long ago. Which, If I read all of the above info correctly, is a bit of a misnomer because it won't really be GONE it will just be out of sight. I suppose I'm hoping for the out of sight-out of mind mentality. I doubt I say very much that many would find helpful or lucrative. And since I'm a therapist, I hope the fear of being psychoanalyzed would prevent someone from doing so. :-)