Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

Am I the only one not shocked or offended? I post publicly on Twitter. Anyone can do that anyway. … Unless I'm missing something.

"privacy betrayed" -> any of this data was ever private. it wasn't.

"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database."

Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site."

Historically Twitter have been pretty good about ensuring, in their licences at least, things like deleted tweets are deleted even from external archives. It's what makes compiling a database of tweets - even for research purposes - quite difficult.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022

Unless you opted to have a private profile. I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle.

I agree, however: if you want to keep your thoughts private, don't post them on the Internet. When do you do that, they don't belong to you anymore.

The people who are shocked and offended don't understand that they aren't the user of these "free" social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). They / we are in fact the product and once it's realized that your data is being sold to others than you will change the way you interact with the networks.