Library of Congress, Facing Privacy Concerns, Clarifies Twitter Archive Plan

If you don’t want that tipsy 3 a.m. Twitter post preserved for posterity, then start deleting. Now.

Faced with privacy concerns, the Library of Congress is clarifying its plans to archive all public tweets posted since Twitter went live in March 2006. The database won’t contain deleted tweets or private account information, according to a list of frequently asked questions recently posted on the library’s blog.

And the Twitter database will only be made available to “qualified researchers,” Martha Anderson, director of the library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, tells The New York Times. The plan is to embargo messages for six months before making them available, but that period could be extended, she says.

“There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term, and we’re sensitive to these concerns,” she says. “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.”

In response, Techdirt blasts the library for pointlessly making the archive “more annoying to use.” And what, asks the blog, do these restrictions achieve anyway? Google already indexes tweets in real time. Yahoo and Microsoft are getting copies, too.

Historians, for their part, are heralding the archive as a potentially valuable resource.

“It’s entirely possible to write about extraordinary people during ordinary times, because someone always keeps your letters when you’re famous,” historian H.W. Brands tells The Washington Post.

“And you can also write about ordinary people during extraordinary times,” because the drama drives regular people to keep records. “The very hard part is writing about ordinary people during ordinary times.”

That, he tells the newspaper, is where Twitter will come in handy.