With our new digital, web-based, cloud-hosted lives comes one thing that we never expected. Immortality. Anything you post to Twitter, Facebook, etc etc, stays there forever, and anyone can search your database of postings. What might have seemed amusing a few years ago, when you were a student, might not be so appealing to a potential employer, customer, spouse or offspring.
In the past few days, Twitter has highlighted the privacy issues on its own service to an even more important extent. Companies who pay the appropriate licence fee can now browse everyone's tweets that have been posted during the past 2 years, rather than the default 30 days offered to normal users. This is being marketed as a service to companies who, for example, might want to detect particular fans (or haters) of its products so that it can target them with specific ads or offers.
This service won't allow access to deleted tweets. So you might think that the easiest option is just to log into Twitter and delete all your recent musings. Unfortunately, although you can easily click on a single tweet to delete it, Twitter doesn't offer a way to bulk-delete entire batches of tweets in one go.
Thankfully, you can do it via a third-party service. Two such services are www.deleteallmytweets.com and www.tweeteraser.com. In each case, just log into the site, sign into your Twitter account, then follow the simple instructions.
Because Twitter doesn't allow third party applications to access thousands of tweets at a time, you will probably find that you need to run through the site a few times in order to delete all of your tweets. But if you want to maintain your online privacy, it does work if you persevere.
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