“We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, [or] without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their DMs,” Musk said. “That’s obviously not going to be cool and it has happened a few times before.”
Musk is correct about DMs being disclosed previously. In 2018, Twitter issued a warning that an unspecified number of direct messages (DMs) between businesses and their consumers had been available to outsiders for more than a year. In addition, the US government prosecuted an ex-employee earlier this year with inappropriately obtaining user data on behalf of Saudi Arabia, though it’s unclear how DMs were or were not utilised.
