Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database."<p>Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site."<p>Historically Twitter have been pretty good about ensuring, in their licences at least, things like deleted tweets are deleted even from external archives. It's what makes compiling a database of tweets - even for research purposes - quite difficult.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022</a>

Wait, so this "article" makes a bunch of claims against Twitter based on zero authoritative links and a bunch of unsourced quotes from ... the Daily Mail?<p>And we're supposed to take this seriously? Come on, doesn't it take more than a bunch of unsubstantiated claims for the HN community to jump on something and just take it at face value?

Am I the only one not shocked or offended? I post publicly on Twitter. Anyone can do that anyway. … Unless I'm missing something.

As long as they don't sell DM's or private account tweets, I don't really see the big issue.. By saying that, I mean I'm comfortable with companies having what was already public in the first place.

Related: <a href="http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq...</a> Library of Congress already has an archive of public tweets.

Twitter is a business, just like any other business, trying to turn a profit. Protect your account if you don't want your <i></i>public<i></i> data being pulled. Anyone can make a timeline API request...

"privacy betrayed" -&#62; any of this data was ever private. it wasn't.

Millions of web apps crawling your tweets and you're worried. If you want privacy don't use social medias.

Once upon a time it was the consumer who was confused about what they owned. We all bought vinyl records because it meant we could hear the music we wanted to. We thought this meant we could do what we liked with the music and even though we couldn't the limitations of the technology meant the artist and record company profits never really suffered. One day digital music came along and suddenly our assumptions about what we could do with the music we owned became a serious problem for record company profits and the whole planet shook.<p>Now we have all become artists; our words, our emails, our tweets and posts the new music. The Twitters and the Googles are the new record companies and once more the confusion between music and vinyl has arisen.

Is there a crowdsourced public archive of tweets? If not, we should build one.

95% of these tweets are ones with links to "enlarge", "boost", "find a adult partner", "xxx" :))

OMG. They'll know everything I ate the past two years!

I wonder how it gets over this [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://tweetcc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tweetcc.com/</a>

I don't get what you can do with twitter data...