Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Delete -A -Tweet

I caught a tweet this morning from the Toronto Police Service about the need to delete a tweet due to the legal authority having expired for some of the information contained within the tweet to still be public. This does happen from time to time due to the way some laws are written. It's a good idea to be able to remove certain information from twitter as some people only follow a few, and I've seen tweets re-tweeted that are a few days old and the information is either no longer valid, or the crime itself has already been solved, or the missing person has already been found.

Some people tweet a lot and may not be able to find the tweet that needs to be deleted, which could run them afoul of the law. Though, I don't think this has ever actually come up, it would be good to have 'protection' against this. Basically, I think there should be an app for twitter developed for Police Services, and other services where information can/needs to 'automatically' expire.

Key features should include:

- a "tweet/link tracker" to keep track of tweets/re-tweets so ALL information can be removed.

- auto-deletion of tweets after a certain time period, settable for each tweet, follows for all re-tweets and associated links.

- manual deletion of tweets, including all re-tweets for removal of 'event' based conclusions. (IE, missing persons).

- A "store house" for the original tweet, since it's an electronic communication and I think the information has to be kept.

At it's most base, the application should be able to remove all traces of the particular tweet from twitter, no matter how it's been re-formatted, including links changed, but still going to the original location.

So...who wants to develop this!

 A Police Officer smiles as a group of cyclists pass by Yonge/Dundas Square - Sunday June 27, 2010

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