BY G.W. SCHULZ | CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING | JANUARY 27, 2011
It’s often done in secret. Law enforcement investigators seek access to private user information stored by websites, routinely imposing a gag order that prohibits the Internet company from telling anyone about the demand.
Don’t you at least have a right to know the rules governing such quiet disclosures? When will sites like Twitter, Facebook, PayPal and others – with their hundreds of millions of users and massive caches of everything from cell-phone numbers to unique computer IDs – begin handing personal information over to the government?
Newly available documents shed light on such questions. Digital rights advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been suing federal agencies for months under the Freedom of Information Act with help from the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. The goal was to force open policies that explain when social networking sites can be used for government surveillance, data collection and investigations.
Results made public so far by EFF are available below (after the jump) for more than a dozen sites in a chart built by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Old and new policies alike are posted next to the document year, so you can compare possible changes over time. EFF argues that the variety among them shows how “social networking sites have struggled to develop consistent, straightforward policies.”
via When can cops gain access to my personal info on Facebook? | Center for Investigative Reporting.
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