Senin, 17 September 2012

A Brief History of Twitter's Battle to Keep Occupy Protester's Data Private and Why It Matters


As expected, Twitter handed over all the information that the court asked for about an Occupy Wall Street protestor who was arrested for disorderly conduct last year. The prosecution wanted all of his tweets over the period of the arrests, the IPs they came from and their location.

They wanted the data to prove that he was lying about not knowing about some police orders.

The details of the case aren't really the issue as the case itself is minor at best, the maximum penalty is $250 if the man is found guilty.

But how the case proceeded so far may have big repercussions. At first, the judge said that because he posted those tweets publicly and because they were now stored by a third party, Twitter, the man had no legal right to fight an order to have them revealed.

This is when Twitter got involved, because it had to. The judge decided that Twitter owned the tweets not their creator, so it asked the company to give up the data.

Understandably, Twitter refused, saying it couldn’t just hand over a user's private data without giving him the chance to fight the order. Twitter has done this in several cases, where possible, fighting the courts for the right to at least notify users that their data is being requested.

The judge then said that since the tweets were made public, initially, there is no privacy issue. After they were published, the tweets were made private and visible only to specific Twitter users.

The meat of the discussion was whether a warrant was needed for the data or just a subpoena. Twitter argued that a warrant was necessary for the search, the judge didn't think so.

Twitter appealed the ruling in another court, but those hearings are scheduled for a later date.

The company asked the judge to wait until that decision was made, but to no avail as it was strong-armed into revealing the data, rather than face a hefty fine and having its financial records made public.

The appeal is still ongoing, but with the outcome becoming meaningless in this case, since the data was already revealed, it's probable that it won't go forward. The appeal had the chance to clear the situation and create a precedent for future cases like this.

Via: A Brief History of Twitter's Battle to Keep Occupy Protester's Data Private and Why It Matters

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