Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

This is interesting: Twitter stores all tweets. All of them. All the mindless drivel, the babble, the sponsored tweets, the quotations and witty sayings, the urls, the photos, the personal data. Forever, apparently. Or maybe just for two weeks. Who can know? The New York Times paints it as a good thing (“historical”), but I can see arenas of abuse for this.

Many people have worried that the inaccessibility of historical Twitter search results might mean that the messages weren’t being saved at all. Company co-founder Biz Stone told us otherwise by email today, though. Twitter is in fact saving all the tweets. You just can’t access them through search “right now.”

We wrote to Twitter to inquire about the company’s stated plans to scrub forthcoming geolocation data from messages after 14 days. That plan is said to be aimed at avoiding subpoenas, though the publishing of the location data at all is opt-in in the first place.

Scrubbed geolocation data after two weeks and no way to access historical information at all? That sounded like a pretty bum deal for a world-changing new communication platform. So we emailed to ask.

This was the reply we received from Biz Stone: “We definitely save all the tweets although you’re right in noting that our search focuses more on newer content right now. And yes, the plan is to drop the coordinates after 14 days.”

As with everything, you should never reveal sensitive personal information in a public forum, especially an Internet public forum, where data is harvested and stored indefinitely. Twitter’s own Terms of Service says:

Any information that you provide to Twitter is subject to our Privacy Policy, which governs our collection and use of your information. You understand that through your use of the Services you consent to the collection and use (as set forth in the Privacy Policy) of this information, including the transfer of this information to the United States and/or other countries for storage, processing and use by Twitter.

Why on earth Twitter would want to store data on every mommy blogger’s baby diaper change or every businessman’s restaurant tweet is beyond me. Unless Twitter has intentions of selling that data. Advertisers pay BIG money for such targeted data.