Comment by narrator
7 years ago
I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.
7 years ago
I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.
Unless it's encrypted and ephemeral, treat every bit sent out to the internet, a public network, as your public persona.
Yep, another way of looking at it is if it leaves your device, assume the information is eventually open to the public.
Amen. Once you upload it, you should just assume it’s out there forever. It’s probably worth assuming that virtually all anonymity can be pierced, if not now then within a decade or two.
With a few exceptions, anonymity online is ephemeral at best, subject to the motivation of the person/org trying to deanonymize you.
> Twitter is more anonymous.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? I assume Twitter retains everything as well (even "deleted" tweets) and it's all associated with an email address. Or did you mean it in the sense that far fewer people have a Twitter account?
I used to believe Twitter was better. But once you're above a certain number of active (i.e. publicly retweeting) followers there's a pretty high chance that your tweets will end up in the feed that is used to generate the twitter stream archives:
https://archive.org/details/twitterstream?sort=-publicdate
These are tar files that contain bz2 compressed newline separated twitter events as json. These include deletion events as well, so you can for instance easily estimate the time an auto-deleter is set to.
Yes, they're huge archives, but you could still probably process a year of these for particular targets for under $10 on EC2.
Whilst I'm impressed with archive team's efforts, I would be surprised if there aren't some commercial twitter stream consumers that absolutely dwarf this.
Treat everything you put on twitter as public forever and you won't go too far wrong.
Why would you ever believe it was private? I think Twitter is better because everything is explicitly public, rather than dishonestly pretending it's private.
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Twitter is more about finding your own social graph of people you find interesting than friends/family/coworkers like Facebook is primarily about. I could have a completely anonymous persona on Twitter and get all the same content. I could use a fake name on Facebook but it wouldn't make as much sense, and I could be reverse engineered with some accuracy from just my social graph. Your family is going to tag you as family, etc. The other non family and friends content on Facebook is more watered down than on Twitter and Facebook wouldn't be worth using for that alone.
How is Twitter more anonymous? In the UK people have been locked up for tweets.
Twitter probably have less data on you, but I doubt it can't be linked direct to you by a TLA, say.