<p>Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive</p>
<p>"Tweets, emails and other electronic communications can be considered ‘government documents’ and must be preserved. The National Archives handles official government materials, while the Library of Congress’ mandate is to deal with anything that may have long-term historical interest …</p>
<p>"But how much digital information are we talking about? How about all of the tweets from Twitter’s archives?</p>
<p>‘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,’ Lefurgy said. ‘The archives don’t contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else billions and billions of tweets are there …’"</p>
<p>Aren’t you glad you Tweeted about your last colonoscopy?</p>
<p>It sounds like a stupid idea to me - both unnecessary and invasive to private information of citizens whether they happened to mark something as ‘private’ or not (or whether they even knew how to).</p>
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No more historic than archiving all the junk mail I get in my mailbox, everything for sale on Craigslist, every email any of us has ever sent or received, any letter any of us has ever written or received, blog posts, forum posts, every web site in the world, etc.</p>
<p>Ah, yes, LOC may have it, but how long will it take to get it cataloged, tagged, archived and thus become accessible to most people?</p>
<p>Three years ago I attended a presentation by the chief archivist for one of federal regional archives. According to him, there was data backlog of not just years, but decades (or possibly centuries! Or longer! I believe his exact words were " with current staff allocations, we’ll be working on tagging what we already have [1997-2007] for the next 3 millennia") just for federal emails alone. (Which, as you mention, are required by law to be preserved indefinitely, archived, cataloged/tagged and made available to the public.) </p>
<p>And the problem is getting worse as email traffic and other forms of e-communication increase. Until there is smart software for data tagging/cataloging, I wouldn’t worry too much about your tweet footprint.</p>
There already is some smart software for this and it’s getting smarter every day. People might want to already start worrying if this is something they’re concerned about.</p>
<p>I’m familiar with the smart software. (Some of the best research on this is being done at Los Alamos National Lab…I’ve seen their results.) It’s not yet ‘smart enough’ to be really useful, but it is improving.</p>