from Hacker News

Even years later, Twitter doesn’t delete direct messages

by RobertSmith on 2/15/19, 7:02 PM with 64 comments

  • by B-Con on 2/15/19, 8:57 PM

    A lot of the article focuses on DMs sent from eventually deleted/suspend accounts being accessible from the receiving account.

    When you send a message to another account, it's in their account now. Of course it's not going to disappear along with your account.

    This had been the canonical behavior of messaging clients for forever. Email obviously, but also IM, chat find, etc. (Trying to remember about BBSs.) Once you press send it's not yours anymore.

    This should 100% be the expectation of users anywhere they go. Once you press send, do not count on being able to withdraw it under any circumstances.

    Does this genuinely surprise people or is it a slow news day at TechCrunch?

  • by strict9 on 2/15/19, 10:06 PM

    One of the hardest concepts to explain to non-programmer friends/family is that deleting anything in an app is usually flipping a boolean flag in the database from False to True. And even for the rare cases of actually deleting the record or updating the field value, it likely exists in backups somewhere.

    It's never gone.

  • by cantrevealname on 2/16/19, 6:45 AM

    Skype too. Skype stores your voice mails and video messages forever[1]. I’m not sure about text messages, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they store all messages even if both the sender and recipient deleted them.

    [1] Details: Clicking on Preferences -> Privacy -> Delete history (OS X), or Options -> Privacy Settings -> Clear history (Windows) pretends to delete the voice/video messages but it merely hides them from your view. If you re-install Skype on the same computer or run Skype on a different computer, all those "deleted" voice mails and video messages re-appear. The delete and clear buttons don’t do what they claim.

  • by eberkund on 2/16/19, 2:38 AM

    I recently learned to my surprise that Exchange has a feature that allows you to recall emails from the recipients inbox.

  • by ddebernardy on 2/15/19, 8:48 PM

    It's a bit disingenuous to expect Twitter or any other social media to actually delete deleted data, except perhaps through a GDPR request or similar. Plus, if your account gets hacked and deleted, or if you delete the account and rejoin, you might be very happy that they didn't actually delete anything and are able to restore your account. (I'm not a fan of social networks or what they do with our data, but the database administrator in me tends to side with them on that front. Keeping data around is a lesser evil than losing it.)

  • by Nanocurrency on 2/16/19, 11:22 AM

    I don't think anyone using these social media networks expects perfect privacy, therefore I have no idea why this article is so popular. We'll have close to perfect privacy in some networks running on Ethereum, 10 years from now. You can quote me on this one.

  • by maxxxxx on 2/15/19, 8:35 PM

    Isn't it pretty safe to assume that nothing will ever get really deleted? I wonder if the GDPR will change this.