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Twitter Gov Requests Doubled in 2012
Twitter recently released their first transparency report, outlining how often in the first half of 2012 government or copyright holders requested Twitter account information and how often this information was produced. The majority of information requests (679) came from the United States but also a significant number came from Japan (98). US requests were followed in 75% of the cases while in Japans case only 20% of the requests were fulfilled. Interestingly, only 3 requests to remove a Twitter account by court orders were received (Greece and Turkey) but none of them was followed!
In total, Twitter received in the first half of 2012 as many requests as in all of 2011, which is a much bigger increase than overall Twitter growth (which was at about 20% in the US).
All in all, these numbers do not surprise me that much, taking all of the 140 million active users into account. And it is reassuring that Twitter does not seem eager to give out user data (Twitter already took a stand for an Occupy Wall Street protester at the beginning of this year).
Twitters transparency report is a perfect example on how to build users trust: by making the companies actions transparent. They should be a glowing example for other web companies who basically store all the information of our lives online.
If you are interested in what Facebook sends if they get a subpoena for a user, you can see an example online (it’s 62 pages of Facebook data …).
Twitter Fights for Occupy Protester: Data Belongs to User!
Last October an Occupy Wall Street protester was arrested for “disorderly conduct” in New York City. As part of his prosecution Twitter received a court order, requiring it to hand over 3 months of Twitter data to the court. The prosecutors obviously hoped that he sent some infringing direct messages since usual Twitter messages are public anyway. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone if Twitter would have handed over the data without complaining. However, recently the company refused! And not only that, the amazing part is that they did this because they state that the data belongs to their users! Thus, the court has to ask the user to hand over the data (who is not very willing either). This is an astounding development, given that generally Internet companies make their privacy policies stricter so they can do whatever they want with their users data.
These are the cases when companies can show how serious they take their privacy policy and, essentially, on which side they are on.
Reading Privacy Policies Would Cost us 250 hours per year
Google's unified privacy policy
A paper, already published in 2008, by Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Cranor of the Carnegie Mellon University, suggests that the time needed to read all privacy policies we accept in our daily online lives amounts to 250 hours of “work” in a year and the cost of reading these policies amounts to $781 Billion per year. It is obvious that no one can spare the time to read these policies and I do not know anyone who does. It is also obvious that these are not there to inform the user in any way but to create legal protection for the companies against lawsuits. As a result, it is claimed that only 3% percent of users read the policies carefully (though this number still sounds quite high to me, the original study does not seem to be available anymore).
Even though quite controversial, I believe the new Google Privacy Policy, which unifies privacy policies from all Google services, is a step in the right direction. At least they try to explain to the user what it means. Also Facebook recently proposed to update their policies in order to be easier to understand for users. And since a large portion of services we use are Google or Facebook anyway, we save a big chunk from those 250 hours per year…
Digital Privacy 