Even Years Later, Twitter Doesn't Delete Your Direct Messages

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter retains direct messages for years, including messages you and others have deleted, but also data sent to and from accounts that have been deactivated and suspended, according to security researcher Karan Saini. Saini found years-old messages in a file from an archive of his data obtained through the website from accounts that were no longer on Twitter. He also reported a similar bug, found a year earlier but not disclosed until now, that allowed him to use a since-deprecated API to retrieve direct messages even after a message was deleted from both the sender and the recipient -- though, the bug wasn't able to retrieve messages from suspended accounts.

Direct messages once let users 'unsend' messages from someone else's inbox, simply by deleting it from their own. Twitter changed this years ago, and now only allows a user to delete messages from their account. 'Others in the conversation will still be able to see direct messages or conversations that you have deleted,' Twitter says in a help page. Twitter also says in its privacy policy that anyone wanting to leave the service can have their account 'deactivated and then deleted.' After a 30-day grace period, the account disappears, along with its data. But, in our tests, we could recover direct messages from years ago -- including old messages that had since been lost to suspended or deleted accounts. By downloading your account's data, it's possible to download all of the data Twitter stores on you. A Twitter spokesperson said the company was 'looking into this further to ensure we have considered the entire scope of the issue.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.