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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
by ddebernardy 8y ago
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.)
- spudlyo 8y agoYour instincts are correct. I happen to know that DMs at Twitter are (and most likely still) stored in a sharded MySQL store[0]. Deleted DMs and tweets are "tombstoned", and not actually deleted via a DELETE, which has pretty terrible performance characteristics in MySQL [0]: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/12/19/how-twitter-stores-250-million-tweets-a-day-using-mysql.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/12/19/how-twitter-store...
- Operyl 8y agoI wonder what they use to generate IDs! /s Man that comment popped up a bunch in that blog post, lol.
- wavesounds 8y agoIt's not disingenuous at all. Snapchat deletes all messages, photos and videos by default, either immediately after their received or within 24 hours.
- talaketu 8y agoThat's a very wacky take. A general privacy principle is that if the user requests the service provider to delete the user's data, then the service provider should comply, unless there are legal injunctions. It's arguable about user expectation for direct messages on twitter, given there is a sender and receiver and Twitter in the middle, but what is not arguable is that if both users delete the message or their accounts, then the messages should not be retained by the Twitter.