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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 anoth

by B-Con 8y ago

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?

nikanj 8y ago
The same went for letters too, back when those were still being written.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  With the difference being that nobody had a copy of your letters, just the recipient.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Not to sound like an ahole but I presume Twitter would argue it's __their__ message (in the sense that it's on their platform). with the sender and recipient having access to it. Once you hit submit you've forfeited "direct ownership" of the message.
    - mdhshjdjsh 8y ago
      AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a similar policy, which, I think, if I remember correctly, was a defining moment for AIM, and once again, for AOL. The EULA for AIM was such that your messages became AOL’s intellectual property. Not only that you could not sue AOL Time Warner for possibly scripting and producing a movie and thus profiting from one of your instant message conversations or chat transcripts, but that maybe they could sue you for trying to do the same, and win. I had this feeling, the moment that showed up in the news, that AOL’s days were numbered, and I was right. Other companies soon released chat functions, including Google and Facebook, and now AIM is gone. It was a signal that AIM was unsuitable for enterprise messaging, and no one excpet teenagers should bother with it, and wventually the teenagers that did use it, grew out of it, and moved on, and the rest is history.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
nebulaserfer 8y ago
As an example, you can delete your messages in telegram. Even in Slack. I think it is reasonable to allow user completely erase its own history from the server.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dhimes 8y ago
  Pretty sure that's the case in MeWe too.
- wbronitsky 8y ago
  Those are chat services, which are obviously a different model. Twitter operates their DMs much more like mail or email. If you were allowed to delete the DMs you sent, you could easily threaten someone, then remove the offending message... which is exactly the issue they are having with harassment on the platform in its current iteration. Maybe, instead of thinking that language is ephemeral, we should realize that what we say has lasting consequences. Maybe then we wont be so mad when we can't take what we said back.
  - taurath 8y ago
    What we say has lasting consequences, but we're not giving a deposition when socializing. We have no mechanism to show how we've evolved over time on any currently contentious issue - a weak "that was a long time ago" doesn't tend to matter. The ability to forget what is no longer important is a trait that is crucial to our brain function, and it stands to reason that it is crucial for a society.
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    I find Twitter DMs to be very much like a chat. It has the UI of a chat app and messages are stored on a centralized service. What makes it obviously a different model and more like email or mail?
    - fireattack 8y ago
sct202 8y ago
Yeah Facebook also does the same thing, but the name is stripped out if the account no longer exists.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Yup. The last time I went to delete a DM thread a couple months ago FB gave me a warning that the delete was only from my end and that the thread would persist on the receiving end.
wutbrodo 8y ago
> Does this genuinely surprise people or is it a slow news day at TechCrunch? I was gonna say... I don't think techcrunch cares whether something is a story as much as they care whether it's a headline.
- skilled 8y ago
  TechCrunch patting itself on the back.
cdoxsey 8y ago
Its right there in the privacy policy: https://twitter.com/en/privacy https://twitter.com/en/privacy > When you use features like Direct Messages to communicate, remember that recipients have their own copy of your communications on Twitter - even if you delete your copy of those messages from your account - which they may duplicate, store, or re-share.
mejari 8y ago
Then why, as mentioned in the article, does Twitter say the exact opposite? >Once an account has been deactivated, there is a very brief period in which we may be able to access account information, including Tweets.
- elefanten 8y ago
  It doesn't. That's referring to account information broadly.
  - mejari 8y ago
    I included the relevant part of the quote: >including Tweets.
geuszb 8y ago
The article actually starts by acknowledging that there used to be a feature called "Unsend", and that the issue being reported here is NOT about that. From what I understand, Twitter keeps storing messages that the _recipient has deleted_ even after the _sender account was closed_. I don't think it would be an unreasonable expectation to see these messages deleted from Twitter storage. The question IMO is, at what point should you stop storing a message that no user can actually access anymore? That data is not good to keep for anyone, since both sender and recipient expressed a desire to delete it.

by B-Con 8y ago

nikanj 8y ago

The same went for letters too, back when those were still being written.

zapzupnz 8y ago
With the difference being that nobody had a copy of your letters, just the recipient.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Not to sound like an ahole but I presume Twitter would argue it's __their__ message (in the sense that it's on their platform). with the sender and recipient having access to it. Once you hit submit you've forfeited "direct ownership" of the message.
  - mdhshjdjsh 8y ago
    AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a similar policy, which, I think, if I remember correctly, was a defining moment for AIM, and once again, for AOL. The EULA for AIM was such that your messages became AOL’s intellectual property. Not only that you could not sue AOL Time Warner for possibly scripting and producing a movie and thus profiting from one of your instant message conversations or chat transcripts, but that maybe they could sue you for trying to do the same, and win. I had this feeling, the moment that showed up in the news, that AOL’s days were numbered, and I was right. Other companies soon released chat functions, including Google and Facebook, and now AIM is gone. It was a signal that AIM was unsuitable for enterprise messaging, and no one excpet teenagers should bother with it, and wventually the teenagers that did use it, grew out of it, and moved on, and the rest is history.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

nebulaserfer 8y ago

As an example, you can delete your messages in telegram. Even in Slack. I think it is reasonable to allow user completely erase its own history from the server.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dhimes 8y ago
Pretty sure that's the case in MeWe too.
wbronitsky 8y ago
Those are chat services, which are obviously a different model. Twitter operates their DMs much more like mail or email. If you were allowed to delete the DMs you sent, you could easily threaten someone, then remove the offending message... which is exactly the issue they are having with harassment on the platform in its current iteration. Maybe, instead of thinking that language is ephemeral, we should realize that what we say has lasting consequences. Maybe then we wont be so mad when we can't take what we said back.
- taurath 8y ago
  What we say has lasting consequences, but we're not giving a deposition when socializing. We have no mechanism to show how we've evolved over time on any currently contentious issue - a weak "that was a long time ago" doesn't tend to matter. The ability to forget what is no longer important is a trait that is crucial to our brain function, and it stands to reason that it is crucial for a society.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  I find Twitter DMs to be very much like a chat. It has the UI of a chat app and messages are stored on a centralized service. What makes it obviously a different model and more like email or mail?
  - fireattack 8y ago

sct202 8y ago

Yeah Facebook also does the same thing, but the name is stripped out if the account no longer exists.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Yup. The last time I went to delete a DM thread a couple months ago FB gave me a warning that the delete was only from my end and that the thread would persist on the receiving end.

wutbrodo 8y ago

> Does this genuinely surprise people or is it a slow news day at TechCrunch? I was gonna say... I don't think techcrunch cares whether something is a story as much as they care whether it's a headline.

skilled 8y ago
TechCrunch patting itself on the back.

cdoxsey 8y ago

Its right there in the privacy policy: https://twitter.com/en/privacy https://twitter.com/en/privacy > When you use features like Direct Messages to communicate, remember that recipients have their own copy of your communications on Twitter - even if you delete your copy of those messages from your account - which they may duplicate, store, or re-share.

mejari 8y ago

Then why, as mentioned in the article, does Twitter say the exact opposite? >Once an account has been deactivated, there is a very brief period in which we may be able to access account information, including Tweets.

elefanten 8y ago
It doesn't. That's referring to account information broadly.
- mejari 8y ago
  I included the relevant part of the quote: >including Tweets.

geuszb 8y ago

The article actually starts by acknowledging that there used to be a feature called "Unsend", and that the issue being reported here is NOT about that. From what I understand, Twitter keeps storing messages that the _recipient has deleted_ even after the _sender account was closed_. I don't think it would be an unreasonable expectation to see these messages deleted from Twitter storage. The question IMO is, at what point should you stop storing a message that no user can actually access anymore? That data is not good to keep for anyone, since both sender and recipient expressed a desire to delete it.