Security researcher 'concerned' to find Twitter is not deleting your deleted direct messages

When you delete a direct message on Twitter, it is gone forever, right? From a user's point of view, this is true -- a deleted message vanishes. But a security researcher has discovered that Twitter is actually hanging onto these messages.

Karan Saini found that he was able to see messages he deleted years ago when he downloaded an archive of his Twitter data from the site.

Upon obtaining his data archive, Saini found that it included messages that had been deleted, as well as some from accounts which had been deactivated. He has expressed concerns at his discovery which appears to be in contradiction to claims made on Twitter's help pages.