Your protected tweets are private – sort of.

In a world besotted with voyeurism, those of us who prefer to remain private may be concerned about ‘protected’ tweets being available for all the world to see.

Twitter have stressed that protected tweets are just that – protected – but there are a few exceptions. If your account was public up to a certain date, only for you to realise that you wanted your tweets to be protected, everything before the date that you moved to protected mode is available in the dark recesses of Googledom.

Google seems to rely on the last information for a tweet that it could see. So you tweeted something, Google sees the tweet and records it. However, once protected Google tries to revisit your tweets as it does with any web page, to see if it has fresh information, but no longer has access.These protected tweets were never seen so are never listed, however it keeps showing the unprotected information from the last time it saw it. And apparently, it will keep doing this for months.

Also, if you have a protected account, also keep in mind that those who follow you might retweet what you tweet to the world. If you’re that worried, make sure you pick your followers carefully and regularly keep them informed that you don’t want things retweeted.

For now, we just have to wait it out. Alternatively, the post office are always ready to help.