> Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway
Or in the databases of one of their data stream customers, or in the database of someone that customer made the data available or on-sold it to. If you're a Twitter customer you're supposed to read and apply their stream of updates and deletes to your database, so that when someone deletes a tweet in Twitter you delete it too, but in practice Twitter doesn't seem to care or enforce that this happens. It's also just a lot from a technical perspective, the volume of these changes is large.
The only reasonable behaviour is to assume that your government (local police, military, whoever - probably multiple separate agencies) has all your tweets, forever. Not because they hacked Twitter or had the NSA tap the lines - they just bought the data from someone Twitter sold it to. Twitter probably doesn't even know who these down-stream buyers are.
Or in the databases of one of their data stream customers, or in the database of someone that customer made the data available or on-sold it to. If you're a Twitter customer you're supposed to read and apply their stream of updates and deletes to your database, so that when someone deletes a tweet in Twitter you delete it too, but in practice Twitter doesn't seem to care or enforce that this happens. It's also just a lot from a technical perspective, the volume of these changes is large.
The only reasonable behaviour is to assume that your government (local police, military, whoever - probably multiple separate agencies) has all your tweets, forever. Not because they hacked Twitter or had the NSA tap the lines - they just bought the data from someone Twitter sold it to. Twitter probably doesn't even know who these down-stream buyers are.
(I know for a fact this is happening)