Someone like Zuckerberg has access to your data as well. And what about the government having access to DMs? That’s far scarier. Has Snowden not taught us anything? We are only just now worried about this? Complaining about Musk without complaining about Zuckerberg or the government is just hypocrisy.

I guarantee that someone like Zuckerberg does not have access to my data.

And the moment it became inevitable that Musk took over Twitter I deleted my account. And that was one of many reasons.

The only two social media sites that I partake in are HN and up to Elons acquisition Twitter and that is because I had/have a fairly high degree of faith in their ability to at least try to do the right thing. With Musk, Zuckerberg and several others I have the conviction that given the opportunity that they will do the wrong thing.

Would you bet that Musk has not already abused his position to gain information from private communications on Twitter?

He means someone who doesn't share your political perspective. Not someone with actual threat of force.

We haven't seen Twitter arbitrarily leak DMs yet. Even Matt Taibbi said they only have access to screenshots of admin interfaces directly related to their specific stories around uncritical FBI/DHS access, shadowbanning for questionable political purposes, and the whole Trump thing. It's far from the ideological free-for-all people are comparing it to (how it was before).

But Elon has already shown he's willing to play dangerous games with his power. So far we haven't seen the FUDy stuff yet beyond the stupid new doxxing rule for which he's burned tons of good will. Nothing comes without costs.

Until they get hacked. The chances of which are going up by the day.

Insider leaks would be a higher risks given Twitter is still in SF. But ultimately the public benefits from open information right?

Unless you mean purposeful 'hacks' with a specific agenda that only leaks private DMs of a select group? Yes, that would be bad.

> A hacker pulling off an exfiltration of the entire DB of any major tech company I'm very skeptical about that happening.

Under normal circumstances I would agree, but after firing so many people I can't imagine that security at Twitter is still priority #1, they likely have trouble keeping the lights on.

That would be the cherry on top of all this drama

I would not at all be surprised. At the rate Twitter is going down the drain you can expect anything, up to and including their hardware being sold at auction to the highest bidder, with some bad luck harddrives included.

We're eventually going to get to so many caveats and inclusions in sentences, it's going to be impossible to read.

That's not hypocrisy at all.

What's really worrying to me is that he can change those DMs to say whatever suits his fancy, coupled with the fact nobody remaining at Twitter is in any position to blow the whistle on such conduct. It would likely remain secret indefinitely.

I had not even considered that, good point, data integrity is not to be expected going forward. This also puts a rather interesting twist on any of the evidence presented.

Why was data integrity expected going backward?

In between there was a change of management. If you failed to notice that why are you commenting in this thread?

>What's really worrying to me is that he can change those DMs to say whatever suits his fancy,

I mean NSA has had this capability for 25 years.

Really? News to me. If NSA has had this secret ability, and if it is indeed a secret, how is it that some random person knows all about it and now feels perfectly safe revealing it on a public web site? Changing data in real time on private databases goes way beyond traffic monitoring & intelligence-gathering.

As opposed to those who had access to them previously?

They were never "your" DMs.

The people who had access to them previously had a modicum of ethics, the current management not so much.

That seems to be wishful thinking, not a fact based statement.

I worry about this risk a lot. There is no way to delete DMs on Twitter; even if you delete them they stay in the system so the other side of the conversation has them. To folks below saying "that was always true", yes, but I trusted the previous management of Twitter to not snoop on my private DMs. I do not trust the current owner the same way.

(I had a typo in my original comment btw; I said "surprising" but meant "unsurprising".)