What You Need To Know About The Latest Twitter Privacy Ruling
By Adam Cohen July 9, 2012
Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it. Last week, the government scored a major win - and Internet privacy lost big - when a judge ruled against Twitter in a fight over a trove of information about a political activist.
New York prosecutors asked Twitter to hand over tweets that Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester, sent over a three-and-a-half month period. It might not seem like a privacy invasion to read people's tweets, but the government's request included other kinds of information that Twitter has about Harris, which could include private communications and records of his physical whereabouts. This is just the sort of stuff we should be worried about the government getting easy access to, and just the sort of precedent that should worry anyone who uses social media.
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