Twitter Transparency Report. DOJ Wants to Know Who’s Rejecting Your Friend Requests. In the latest turn in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records related to the government’s use of social networking websites , the Department of Justice finally agreed to release almost 100 pages of new records. These include draft search warrants and affidavits for Facebook and MySpace and several PowerPoint presentations and articles on how to use social networking sites for investigations.
(For more on what we've learned from the documents so far, see our earlier blog posts here , here , here , here , here , and here .) The draft search warrants are particularly interesting because they show the full extent of data the government regularly requests on a person it’s investigating. As of December 2009, Facebook is technically limited in its ability to provide complete IP logs ( , IP logs that contain content and transactional information, in addition to login IPs).
See the documents linked below for more ( ). - Facebook Warrant, Affidavit, and Usage Notes. DHS Monitoring Of Social Media Under Scrutiny By Lawmakers. WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers looking into homeland security officials' practice of monitoring social media sites seized on a report Thursday by a civil liberties group that said taxpayers have shelled out more than $11 million to a private contractor to analyze online comments that "reflect adversely" on the federal government.
In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, members of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence held up a report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) as they questioned the chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security. The hearing, titled "DHS Monitoring of Social Networking and Media: Enhancing Intelligence Gathering and Ensuring Privacy," relied heavily on talking points from a recent EPIC report on nearly 3,000 pages of documents it obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), the subcommittee chairman, and Rep. Google+ and Privacy: A Roundup. July 3, 2011 at 7:04 pm By all accounts, Google has done a great job with Plus, both on privacy and on the closely related goal of better capturing real-life social nuances. [1] This article will summarize the privacy discussions I’ve had in the first few days of using the service and the news I’ve come across. The origin of Circles “Circles,” as you’re probably aware, is the big privacy-enhancing feature. A presentation titled “The Real-Life Social Network” by user-experience designer Paul Adams almost exactly a year ago went viral in the tech community; it looks likely this was the genesis, or at least a crystallization, of the Circles concept. But Adams defected to Facebook a few months later, which lead to speculation that it was the end of whatever plans Google may have had for the concept. Meanwhile, Facebook introduced a friend-lists feature but it was DOA.
Why are circles effective? There are several other UI features that contribute to the success of Circles. The resharing bug. Thoughts on the DOJ wikileaks/twitter court order. The world's media has jumped on the news that the US Department of Justice has sought, and obtained a court order seeking to compel Twitter to reveal account information associated with several of its users who are associated with Wikileaks. Communications privacy law is exceedingly complex, and unfortunately, none of the legal experts who actually specialize in this area (people like Orin Kerr, Paul Ohm, Jennifer Granick and Kevin Bankston) have yet to chime in with their thoughts. As such, many commentators and journalists are completely botching their analysis of this interesting event. While I'm not a lawyer, the topic of government requests to Internet companies is the focus of my dissertation, so I'm going to try to provide a bit of useful analysis.
However, as always, I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. A quick introduction to the law The order to twitter It is the second part of the order that is more interesting. Reading between the lines 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Seppukoo / Assisting your virtual suicide. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again! - Sign out forever! The Intimate Social Graph. October 14, 2010, 11:02 AM — For a number of years I have had a privacy concern that is just now beginning to peep into view on the Internet at large.
Around 2001 I spent some time in a casual multiuser game hosted by PopCap. It featured a way that two players could chat in a private space while playing the game. The game was centrally hosted: each user's local Java applet talked with a PopCap server, so every keystroke typed in those private conversations was sent up to the server and back out to the other party's client. I wondered at the time: were those conversations being stored?
How about the metadata describing which players talked privately with which others, and how often? The privacy of one-to-one communications in Facebook messages, LinkedIn InMail and Twitter direct messages is protected mainly under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Fast-forward to 2010. Of course the privacy of social networking data is dependent on security. Your Privacy Online - What They Know.