NEW DELHI: According to an online report, micro-blogging website Twitter has been storing the messages shared on the platform. These messages also include the ones which are deleted by the users. Along with this, the social media platform is also keeping the data shared and received within various accounts which have been deleted or suspended.
As reported by TechCrunch, Security researcher Karan Saini has discovered that years old messages in form of a file from the data archive has been obtained via the website from accounts which are no longer active on Twitter.
Earlier also Saini claimed to have reported a same kind of bug. The year old bug allowed him to use an deprecated API which was used to retrieve direct messages even after it was deleted by both the sender and receiver.

Twitter users were earlier allowed to delete messages from the chat with the help of the unsend feature, but now the users are only allowed to remove the messages from their own account. The report "We are looking into this further to ensure we have considered the entire scope of the issue," the report quoted a Twitter spokesperson as saying.

Twitter in its privacy policy mentions that any user who wants to leave the platform can dicativate and then delete their account. After the period of 30 days, the account and all its data will disappear from the platform. "But, in our tests, we could recover direct messages from years ago - including old messages that had since been lost to suspended or deleted accounts. By downloading your account's data, it is possible to download all of the data Twitter stores on you," the report said.

The report also adds that Saini believes that its not a security flaw but a functional bug.

However, this issue could expose some high-risk accounts such as of activists, journalist and others by demanding data from years ago.

Source: gadgetsnow.com