Are my tweets deleted when I close my twitter account?

You may ask yourself this question if you’re fearful about your privacy.
The answer is NO. Your data are not deleted.

You may understand the Twitter terms and conditions otherwise:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

The real reason you have to assume your tweets are not deleted is you cannot verify how Twitter store their data (their cache system, their databases, their backups, their hard drives etc.).
They keep your tweets for a undisclosed amount of time (which can be translated by forever) because it makes sense to them, not for you.

It doesn’t mean Twitter is evil. They just own a process that you cannot control.

In fact not so long ago you were able to re-open your account and all your tweets were restored.
I did it in March 2008 with my thyboo profile.

Hi there, thyboo!

Glad to see you decided to restore your Twitter account.
Please open this link in your browser:

http://twitter.com/account/confirm_restore?email=xxx&token=xxx

This will confirm that you’d like to restore your account.
If you want to stay deleted, just don’t open the link.

All the best,
Twitter

and few days later:

Thanks for your patience, thyboo.

Your Twitter account has been restored. Your password has been temporarily set to: xxx
You can now sign in again with your temporary password at:

http://twitter.com/

Please be sure to change your password after signing in.

Yours truly,
Twitter

Currently Twiter says account restoration is disabled.
To me it’s one of the clever “trick” used to persuade you to not delete your account.

The goodbye page: a model of persuasion because of its reduced friction. Twitter prefer to keep abandoned accounts while the user prefer to keep their username.

Beside there is more than one provider using the tweets.
By example they are currently included in Google search results.

Because of the very own nature of “digital data that have been shared”: they can’t be deleted.

This is not true! Look! We can’t retreive the tweets of Kathy Sierra!

Kathy Sierra, an extraordinary inspirational teacher who created the website “creating passionate users”, closed her Twitter account in early 2010.

It is true that the public cannot access her tweets anymore (as of 24 March 2010).

But don’t worry, they will reappear at some stage.
When it will make sense for Twitter to do it.
When it will make sense to somebody not keeping the situation that way.
The truth is they have not been deleted.
Could you believe, just a fraction of a second, that they are not used for data mining?

Beside it’s also because we’re not looking hard enough. Some copies still exist.

And I still can read them on my Google reader :

The KathySierra Twitter feed is still accessible in my Google RSS reader.

That said loss of data do exist. That’s why the best backup of all is: sharing!

But what about private tweets then?

Private tweets are no more no less than tweets in the purgatory of being public.
Sooner or later, a person you don’t want to access your tweets, will read them.
This will happen one way or another.
Because you don’t know when it will makes sense for Twitter to publish them publicly.
Because one day you will make them public by mistake.

It’s easy to deactivate the privacy setting on Twitter. Try on a touch screen mobile phone.

I believe that “once published on the Internet, you don’t own it anymore”.
It cannot be private. If it’s confidential, keep it in your head. Tell no-one.

The only thing you can fight for is being recognised as the original author. And the only way to do it is to publish something and make sure a lot of people are sharing.
The most people being inspired by your work, the better your reputation.

The default mode of the Internet is everything public.
The users want it that way. Otherwise we would have seen much more intranets instead of public websites.
The only time people want to protect content is not because it has a privacy value, but because it has a money value.

The moral of this story is:

Instead of fighting against that fact, it might be better to turn it as your own advantage. But it’s true no human society ever lived that way before. So there is a lot to learn.

Which is what we’re trying to do through this blog.

Thanks for reading.
Thibault