Time Is a Privacy Setting | The Awl
An interesting way of thinking about this:
Here is one conclusion: Time is a privacy setting. Even Facebook knows this! Users can, for example, keep new friends from seeing private posts from the past. On Twitter, thereâs a lot less flexibility. You official options are going entirely private or deleting your account; your unofficial option is to delete your tweets.
I archived everything before deleting it all, and now my posts automatically disappear after a week, courtesy of one of the dozens of sites that offers such things. The result is that new posts arenât saved anywhere anymore, privately or otherwise, unless theyâre screencapped or embedded. This is fine but not ideal. I think a reasonable demandâor expecation, given how much of a grind the overall Twitter experience has become as the service has matured, and how evident itâs become that all that funlike work and worklike fun that was much easier to rationalize when both the service and your own experience was expanding in exciting ways was never really going to amount to muchâis for the company to treat the age of a usersâ posts as one more privacy parameter. I donât suppose theyâre really incentivized to do this. The new search product theyâre selling to brands suggests that theyâre incentivized not to. But at the very least we can understand this as a problem; as something a better service would offer, and that users of a better internet would take for granted.
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