If you post it on Twitter, it’s public. If it’s public, it can be collected by the police.
The company says that the vast majority of requests for users’ information comes from police departments.
Of the 849 total government requests for user information during the period spanning January 1 to June 30 this year, 679 — or 80 percent — took place in the United States, typically for use in criminal investigations, Twitter said.
Japan was in second place: 98 requests. There were 11 requests from the United Kingdom, and 11 from Canada.
It is clear that the American police are the big users.
Twitter is being pulled into criminal prosecutions.
The day you post on Twitter is the day you lose your privacy. What’s on Twitter stays on Twitter. It’s not Las Vegas.
On Monday, a New York judge ruled that the company must hand over tweets published by Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protestor arrested during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge in October. Twitter had fought to dismiss a request from prosecutors seeking the tweets as evidence, arguing that they belonged to Harris under the company’s terms of service.
Most people will never get targeted. But you should bear in mind at all times that a post on Twitter or any social network medium can spread far beyond your original intention. They are public documents.
There are teenagers who are posting information on themselves that will stay with them forever.
Continue reading here.
______________________
Published on July 4, 2012 The original is here.
I signed up for Twitter in late 2009 or early 2010. To get an account that allowed me to customize my short Bitly links, I had to join Twitter, so I did. That was a great decision. I use Bitly constantly in its original format: bit.ly. The "ly" is the national suffix of Libya. But I have never used Twitter, or even visited it to read Twitter posts.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.