Twitter keeps ‘deleted’ ‘private’ messages for years

Twitter would store private messages stored by users on its servers for years. Researcher Karan Saini discovered that, reports TechCrunch.

Also messages sent by accounts that were later canceled or banned by Twitter.

The saved messages were discovered by retrieving data from an account at Twitter. In that data there were private messages that would normally not be accessible to users themselves, for example because the account that received the messages was canceled.

TechCrunch points to the fact that Twitter may endanger persons by storing the data. In this way, a government could still get behind sensitive conversations from, for example, activists or journalists.

In addition, Twitter claims that all data is removed from an account as soon as a use cancels his account. In the European Union, strict privacy legislation went into effect in May, which requires companies to actually delete certain data when users request it.

A spokesperson for Twitter told TechCrunch to investigate the situation further, but did not respond to the content.