Deleted Tweets found living in the hereafter Careless Twitterers are in for a healthy dose of Web 2.0 reality with the advent of a site that shows it's not really possible to purge errant tweets, as the microblogging site might have them believe. It has long been plenty easy for world+dog to find a user's deleted posts by using Twitter's advanced search page. Now, a site …
I've noticed Google visits a BBC blog where I'm a regular at least once an hour. So taking that as a benchmark, it's probably safe to say that anything published online for at least one hour may not be able to be permanently deleted. In the case of personal websites (NOT social networking profiles - proper websites), you may be able to get away with up to a day or so (i.e. if it's rarely visited, so search engines won't find it in a hurry), but after that the information is likely to exist on your hosting provider's backup tapes long after you've deleted it.
There's one simple rule to follow: if you wouldn't be happy for the information to be displayed on a billboard in your town centre, don't publish it :)
Anyone interested in their micro blog or whatever Twitter is actually supposed to be is obviously planning something devious. These Twits are letting us down. Setting the precedent that telling the world + dog what you're doing all the time is not only acceptable but desirable too.
So some smug MP can say it's okay to spy on us because we don't want privacy anyway. Just as long as he and his children can opt out of the big spy database, of course. Bah.
Perhaps not from your porn star name since you've only given us half your street name and, being a Reg reader, you're unlikely to have used "Name of my first pet" as a security question for your bank website -- other's aren't so clued up.
Oddly I didn't know that the "porn star name" and others were well known fishing scams -- I thought I worked it out for myself.
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