Image via CrunchBase

I've been taken to task for my post earlier this week about tweet protection being meaningless. It turns out that the person whose tweets lead to the article toggles protection on and off, and apparently quite frequently. But that begs the question: If you're turning protection on and off, why bother having it on in the first place? And if you just straight-up have it on, why are you bothering with Twitter in the first place?

Twitter is first and foremost a communication tool. The whole point of the service is pushing out short messages to the world. If you protect your updates, you're keeping yourself from reaching people who may be helped or interested in what you tweet.

I'd like to ask why you protect (or would protect) your Twitter updates. Really, I'm curious as to why people actually bother to use this feature! If there's no answer in the poll below which matches your reasoning, please leave a comment and explain why you would (or do) hide your updates from the rest of the world.