Who should in control of the delete button on the internet?
Recently, the official Twitter account has stirred up controversy by posting a joke about Knowing Your Tweets. The official account ask the users whether or not they remember their first tweet, then the official Twitter account states “We do！”
Many are wondering why Twitter is emphasizing the fact that it remembers your first tweet. Some of the users already deleted their first twitter for some reason they don’t want it to be recorded. However, as we can tell there is never a real “delete”, once you posted on the internet, your data will be recorded and they will use it in the way they think it’s necessary without your consent.
Therefore, just like the twitter user showed, some users felt uncomfortable about it, and thought that this tweet may be in violation of the major General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was passed in Europe recently, while some others don’t think so, they think it’s exaggerated and inaccurate to connect this to GDPR, because they said “If you tweet any personal information GDPR does not apply because you share that tweet either to the world or just followers, Data Protection is not about Tweets, it’s there to protect personal information about you ID, etc.”
In my point of view, the main purpose of this joke is to connect with users by using the official account, it is an attempt at humor but a poor one without all things considered. Especially at the time when people are very angry and disappointed about various kinds of social media’s invasion of their privacy, such an approach is undoubtedly thoughtless. For example, the privacy disclosure of Facebook users, which caused great controversy before; Twitter privacy breach involves the inappropriate use of users’ personal information to serve up targeted ads to users. In the face of these issues, governments have come up with some policies, just like the GDPR in the EU.
For cases like the personal information revealing is considered in the “purpose limitation” of the GDPR, “for example forbids companies from using data for any illegitimate business purposes for which there is no valid reason like users’ consent.” However, what about the cases like this one, they may not completely under protection of the GDPR, but it’s clear that in this case those twitter users who have deleted their first posts never gave their consent to store their deleted tweets, and users will never know where will their data end up, we all know the tweets or any posts may include photos with friends or families, location information or any other important personal information.
Due to the distrust of the social media platforms that caused by the social media’s invasion of users’ privacy, users will assume everything ends in the worst way inevitably. So they will stop post anything related to their personal life and decrease the frequency of using social media, that’s definitely not what we want to see in the future.
The trust relationship between the user and the platform must be rescued as soon as possible. The platforms should give the right to control the legal contents in their accounts to the users themselves, and relevant policies should also be issued to protect the user’s rights and information. So that people can truly remove the content on the internet that they no longer want to share with others and the content will not be used illegally without users’ consent. We users should control the delete button on the internet by ourselves.
