Since I found Twitter as useful as the hair on the back of my hand, I decided to delete my account. I was hoping Twitter had a better data policy when it comes to account deletion but I guess not. Apparently they hold onto your information for as long as they choose to:
Here is the problem - If a user asks to delete their information, just delete it. There is no reason to hold onto it. If I requested to have my information deleted then you better make sure that you have no identifiable traces of it. There should be no reason that my personally identifiable information should be kept on your server(s).
I consider the technical team over at twitter to be smart individuals but I guess they got the database query wrong when they were trying to figure out how to delete user accounts, here is a freebie twitter, I will not charge you my consultant fee:
DELETE FROM users WHERE users.username = 'foobar';
OR
DELETE FROM users WHERE users.id = 123456789;
Not hard things to do, hell you can even throw in a REFERENCE from a foreign key and have it delete all the tweets, images and everything else associated with the user. Walk the plank!
