Twitter hands over protester's private data
Summary: Twitter wanted no part of a fight with the New York State Supreme Court.
Twitter complied with a judge’s deadline Friday and submitted three months of Tweets by an end-user who was arrested last year in an Occupy Wall Street protest, the Associated Press reported.
On Tuesday, New York State Supreme Court Judge New York City Criminal Court judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. ordered Twitter to produce the information in three days or face a fine that he would calculate based on the company’s earnings statements from the past six months.
It is not uncommon for Twitter to give up end-user data as part of legal challenges. According to Twitter’s Transparency Report from July 2012, on a global basis the company provides “some or all data” in requests for user information 63% of the time.
The court order for the data came as part of an appeal from the social networking giant that asked the court to reverse an earlier judgment. The case involves the private data of Twitter user Malcom Harris, who was arrested with 700 other protesters during an Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstration last October.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg quoted Sciarrino: “I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish [Twitter] is monetarily.”
Sciarrino’s order called on Twitter to supply information that might link Harris to the account responsible for the Tweets that were posted publicly.
In May, Twitter stepped into the fray after Harris tried to thwart the court’s attempt to obtain three-months of his Tweets. The court contended he did not own that data, which is stored on Twitter servers.
Harris Tweeted in May “ The secret is: there's nothing incriminating in the tweets.”
But the case is not so much about the content of the Tweets as the protection of data, private or otherwise, users put on the Internet.
An ACLU spokesman told The Huffington Post UK last week: "It is becoming increasingly clear that law enforcement around the U.S. is aggressively issuing subpoenas and obtaining court orders to obtain information about people’s internet activities and communications. We don’t know exactly how often, because the vast majority of these requests are never made public, and many are kept secret by court order. But we do know that it is occurring a lot."
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Talkback
"personal data" or tweets?
Now there's the stuff we really care about - our private communications, our diaries (if we keep them) our medical history and our relationship information. Now that information should remain as private as we choose it to be - obviously if you sky-write your relationship status or propose on tv, several other people you didn't tell are going to know. There's two types of tweet (unless I've been miss-using) public and private - well public by definition can be personal, but not private data.
What about private tweets? Is this any different to taking a PC or laptop as evidence in a trial? Following you and recording your movements in an investigation. Your emails are fair game in that instance.
I'm not saying that the "they" should have continuous access to your data, but in an investigation evidence will clear or convict you.
You can't blame twitter, as a company they actually have a responsibility to co-operate with the law authorities; would this be note worthy if it was a child abuse case? they have to apply the rules equally to all.
Personally I'm very sympathetic to the cause the occupy movements represented, but those are the relevant laws and regulations in the case, not requested evidence - if that was protected by law, all those naughty criminals need do is keep incriminating documents online and they'd be pretty much safe.
TOS Compliance
The personal info of this user does not seem to be the actual target, however... what the government wanted were the tweets that were no longer visible because the site only shows a limited history (by count) of any user's tweets at a given time. Since Harris was a prolific tweeter, the tweets that the government were looking for were already "scrolled off".
Among other things, the Twitter TOS states that "your public information is broadly and instantly disseminated". The DA simply is targeting *already* public information that has scrolled off today's displays.
For Mr. Harris - Poor Babies.
For the people that write the subheads on this column - can we get some rational conformance between the title and the article? Anything else is a disservice.
Let them eat cake.
"Let them eat cake."
That won't do for Wall Street, anymore than it did for Marie Antoinette.
Deep inequalities exist out there and we should try to see them -- despite the myopic tendency of the Street.
Information on the internet
Chilling
Privacy
As a different poster mentioned, if you don't want to be eating your own words, don't put them on the Internet anywhere.
IMHO.
Et al
Agreement
Twitter is not private
No it seems to me that the court is trying to penalize the defendant for carrying out legitimate protests against problems in society. They are trying to show that his social media account was used to help organize these protests. So as far as I see it, the court is carrying out a legitimate use of information in the public domain, even though (in my opinion,) it is being used by the court for the illegitimate purpose of demonizing dissent. It is the same as if he was arrested with leaflets in his possession. The user has no expectation of privacy. (Although some of the NY judges that Jack McCoy has tried cases before have had a different opinion ;-) )
On the other hand email has or should have the same expectation of privacy as a phone call or conversation in your home. Unless there was a court order then phone tapping and electronic eavesdropping are illegal and inadmissible. The same should be true of email. (But as someone else said, if you don't want anyone else to know it don't say it on the phone, or on the computer; don't put it in writing; and don't say anything actionable.)