Every Tweet You’ve Ever Written. Every Tweet You Ever Will Write. They Are Now Part Of The Library Of Congress.

The historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

“This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people,” said Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School.

The Web capture project at the National Library of Congress has already stored 167 terabytes of digital material, far more than the equivalent of the text of the 21 million books in the library’s collection.

Some online commentators raised the question of whether the library’s Twitter archive could threaten the privacy of users.

Their terms of service are very straight forward. You own what you write, but Twitter can use them in any way they wish other than actual ‘ownership’.

“Twitter is allowed to ‘use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute’ your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you,” writes Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post Thursday announcing the most recent Terms of Service.

“It’s not as if we’re after anything that’s not out there already,” said Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications. “People who sign up for Twitter agree to the terms of service.”

But how many people who sign up for Twitter actually read the ‘terms of service’ and understand that anything and everything posted on their site is at that point public domain? Fine print, peoples. Teeny tiny fine print.

“Your indiscretions will be seen by generations and generations of graduate students,” said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

People thinking before they post on Twitter: now that would be historic indeed.
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NY Times