Library Of Congress to Archive Every Tweet Since Twitter’s Inception
Twitter posts, a.k.a “tweets,” seem to have reached a new level of importance or, at least, notoriety, in the last week when the Library of Congress announced that Twitter will share all public tweets since the site’s inception with the Library and Google announced they are making a certain amount of tweets searchable.
Matt Raymond, Library of Congress blogger, said in his post of April 14, “. . . it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. . .”
What we might learn, indeed. How many people have strewn personal data over the mass of 140-character-or-less posts to the micro-blogging site? Could someone find out valuable personal information if they conducted searches about you? Could someone find out more about you by using one of these collections instead of searching Twitter’s site? It’s possible that now – deleted accounts will be discoverable in such collections.
However, such saving of data reinforces what we tell members of our identity theft programs and especially the students we speak to about identity theft through our corporate social responsibility initiative: think about what you are posting before you post it because it never goes away. Those of us who grew up before social networking most likely had the good fortune to outlive the recanting of our bad decisions. Today, not only do people often share too much information, but such information will now outlive them.
by Charlotte Rose
Senior Investigator, Kroll Fraud Solutions
