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Will Twitter's lax data ownership policy result in jail time?

Update: My real-time traffic feed says it all. 🙂 Thanks for the mention and link-love M.G. and Techcrunch.

Two people died and 19 passed out at an Arizona sweat lodge last night. The author who hosted the event is James Arthur Ray and is an avid Twitterer. He deleted his 10 most recent tweets after the deaths, but Twitter search still has them cached. I’ve been aware of this for a while because every now and then I’ll go flying into asshole mode, post a tweet and then delete it within the hour. But it remains in Twitter search for all to see.

But I suspect this case of losing control of your data is going to show up in court and be very high profile for Twitter. James most recent tweets are shown in the screenshot below. The two most recent tweets are the pertinent ones.

twitter search

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My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.