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Library of Congress To Receive Entire Twitter Archive
An anonymous reader writes "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."
I deleted my Twitter account and it's been 30 days. Does Twitter still keep those tweets for posterity on their servers through some manner of legal acrobatics?
Even if it's in their TOS that you lose all rights to the IP contained in a given tweet, this will more than guarantee some lawsuits from some very large groups.
...now the inane mumblings and poor grammar of the Twitter Age will be remembered throughout history. I was kinda hoping we'd eventually be able to forget all of this ever happened.
How much space will this take up?
All my pooping tweets preserved for all posteriority. (intentional misspelling)
Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.
Nothing interesting was found.
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Why?
I don't know how correct it is, but @PogoWasRight uses it. I asked her why, and she said that tweets with the #n are ignored by Library of Congress import.
I've thus far stayed out of the privacy debate, but this is starting to scare me. Where is our right to oblivion, as Jeffrey Rosen put it (see this article). We call it a right because it represents a fundamental part of the human psyche. Thusly, we can either adapt our system to account for it or face the consequences later when the system breaks down. I have to put in a dissenting vote for this idea.
A wild corpus appears!
Does anyone know how big the Twitter archive is? In terms of Libraries of Congress? Because with this new "donation", the size of the Library of Congress could double, and it will increase with every tweet.
This happened more than a year ago!!!!!
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
"It has become clear that if a person agrees with the idea that all tweets be archived in the Library of Congress then they are a stupid sheep getting f****d in the mouth :)"
... was gained.
That is all.
Great. Now the taxpayers are on the hook for Twitter's backup maintenance costs. Seriously. They don't even need their own storage anymore. I'm sure, since the Library of Congress is a publicly available entity, they'll have full access to the data-sets. They can just pipe everything straight to the LIB servers then access them at will, at any time. And who the fuck is paying for all that bandwidth?
Next we'll see the entire Facebook data-sets, Google cache data...
This is a joke right?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
... of each unit of writing in said library by about half, I'd say.
Check your premises.
You can have my 'tweets' when you pry my journal (it's not a diary Damnit!) from my cold dead hands.
I think I will wait until Google Books scan it before I bother reading it ;)
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
First, the concept of "anonymity of the crowd" is protected by law in places like Canada. You know, places where the government isn't bought and sold so readily because of limits on political campaign financing ...
Second, nobody authorized twitter (or anyone else) to turn over the entire posting history to researchers.
Twitter Terms of Service: http://twitter.com/tos "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use."
"Nothing is ever really deleted."
Don't be stupid. Twitter lets people delete their posts, but you can't do the same for the stuff that the LoC has archived.
People signed up with the understanding that they could remove tweets from the public record. Turns out twitter, in handing a copy to the library of congress to data mine (and this is what they've said they are doing), is violating that part of the agreement.
You really missed the point. This is an ongoing project that they started doing this over a year ago. If you deleted something 2 months ago that you posted 6 months before, they've still got it.
Dump them. It's the only way to be sure.