Dear Twitter, please fix your lame privacy model (a semi-foamy wall of text rant)

Dear Twitter,

Your account privacy implementation (aka Protected Tweets) is a freaking fiasco. Currently, you practically punish people for activating privacy.

Two examples:

• If my account is private, I literally can't use it to talk to anyone who doesn't follow me. In fact, to add insult to injury, there is no warning that a message sent to an account that is not following me will simply disappear into the void, because they will never be able to read it. Maybe I'm slow, but it took me a couple months to figure this out.
• If my account is private, none of my followers are allowed to do an automatic RT of posts I make.

So what are the ridiculous workarounds this simplistic privacy structure entails?

• I have a second public account. If I think of it, I'll make posts I want the whole world to see from this account. Alas, this is not very often. I also use this account to respond to non-followers that get RT'd and have said something interesting I want to respond to.
• If someone wants to RT something from my private account, they manually RT it and usually end up trimming it.

For example, I posted a tweet this morning saying "So apparently, Carrier IQ is on iPhones too, although without nearly the same level of privacy violations… blog.chpwn.com/post/13572216737".

Unfortunately, that's pretty long, and one of my followers MT'd it, but as "So apparently, Carrier IQ is on iPhones too… blog.chpwn.com/post/13572216737".

So now I have been getting blowback from random accounts on the internet that follow various people who have RT'd this because they think I failed to discern the fact that the iPhone version is set up by default to be much less of a privacy violation than the Android version.

Did I also mention that since they're replying to my private account, I can't reply to them because they're not followers? So I have to copy/paste their @ handles across to my public account to reply? Arrrrrgh!

So what would be a good way to fix your privacy model?

• Allow people to send to non-followers from a private account, but show them a dialog warning them that this post will be public.
• Allow followers to do automatic RT's, but don't actually make the RT's public at first. Instead, send an alert to the private account owner telling them there has been a request to RT them with the option to approve or deny the request.

Thanks for your kind attention in this matter.