One giant leap for Tweet-kind?

According to the New York Times, the Library of Congress will begin archiving Twitter posts. The library explained that this is another step forward in their embrace of digital media. Academic researchers explain that typical historical accounts are elitist, and there are very little documents about everyday people. Archiving tweets can change that.

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

Naturally, this raises a mountain of privacy issues. Any Twitter user's tweets will be forever down in history, whether a celebrity or a high-schooler, and no one seems to have any control over it. Matt Raymond, the library's director of communications, noted that the archive would only be available for scholarly and research purposes, not available to the general public. He also said that the majority of messages that would be archived are already publicly available on the Web.

But what about those messages that aren't part of the majority? There are users who set their profiles to private so only select people can read their tweets. Will these users' tweets be archives along with the public users?

Twitter's privacy policy states, "We may share or disclose your non-private, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public Tweets or the number of users who clicked on a particular link (even if only one did)."

The privacy policy does not include the disclosure of private information or tweets without user consent, so how will this play out as Twitter releases tweets to the Library of Congress? While the language of Twitter's privacy policy essentially makes it clear that there is little public users can do to stop the archiving of their tweets, it leaves private users' situations vague. If Twitter attempts to archive private users' feeds with the library without seeking consent first, it can raise a slew of privacy invasion cases.