SOCIAL MEDIA: FREEDOM OR CHAINS, VOICE OR PUPPET MASTER?

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal with ads in multiple U.S. and British newspapers, and in an interview with CNN, saying the social media platform does not deserve to hold personal information if it cannot protect it.

The ads said a quiz app built by a Cambridge University researcher leaked Facebook data of millions of people four years ago. “This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” the ads said. During his interview with CNN, Mark Zuckerberg suggested the question was not whether Facebook should be regulated so much as how best to do it.

Facebook’s privacy practices have come under fire after Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm affiliated with President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, obtained data inappropriately. The firm is alleged to have created psychological profiles to influence how people vote or even think about politics and society through micro-targeting of thousands (if not millions) of Facebook subscribers.

According to data from the FEC, the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica nearly $6 million for services during the 2016 election cycle. Seventeen other Republican political organizations, including Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and a super PAC headed by incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton, also paid the firm a combined $16 million for services that included research and micro-targeting of voters.

As social media becomes part of life and often an extension of our thoughts, it is time to question whether it is a tool to enhance or restrict our rights. Furthermore, now our concerns must go beyond governmental acts and extend to the actions of private parties who may use social networks for a profit or to influence us by exploiting our personal information.

Social networks implicate our right to free speech but also our right to privacy. To be clear, most rights are not absolute, and neither the right to free speech nor the right to privacy is an absolute right. The right to free speech means that we are allowed to express ourselves without interference or constraint by the government, and that the government can limit both the content of speech and the ability to engage in speech only when there is “substantial justification.”

Likewise, our right to privacy is not absolute, and governments can intrude into our right to privacy to protect society. However, governments generally have had to justify their intrusions in our privacy to achieve the higher goal of protecting society and have had to make use of legally mandated due process safeguards, such as obtaining a wiretap warrant to listen to our private conversations. This is no longer the case with social networks being given direct access to our information and even our most intimate thoughts, which they may then exploit for their own benefit or simply lose track—as in the Cambridge Analytica example.

We might think that social networks allow us to express ourselves in ways that we could not before, and to do it anonymously. But how much of what we post on social networks is private? How much of our information is used for profit? How much control do we even have over our data on social networks? Will social networks provide greater freedom for people to express ourselves and our thoughts, or will they turn out to be a weapon that allows our governments and even private agents to control and monitor our communications?  More importantly, how much of what we think is determined by what’s posted on social media? How much are we being influenced by our online social networks?

These are all questions that as a society we must consider to be able to maintain our individual freewill. The alternative would result if a society where we become puppets of our social media accounts.

 

 

Europe Gets Serious on Data Protection

Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter collect data from their users without their permission and this personalized data can be used, in large measure, to produce targeted advertisement. Advertising networks collect information across a wide span of sites, using cookies that are placed on a user’s computer when loading a page containing an ad, and then they use the Web surfing history to deliver other ads. Every time a user clicks on a “like” on Facebook or plus in Google that information is collected use by these companies and their clients. Internet users’ movements on the web are also being tracked for further use by countless other entities—both public and private.

Europe has been signaling an overhaul of its data protection laws that date from 1995. Last week, one legislator, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the Green Party from Hamburg, introduced a bill that would create a new agency to enforce a series of measures giving Internet users greater control of their online information.

If approved, the proposal would replace an advisory panel to the European Commission with a privacy regulator with the power to make decisions for the 27 members of the European Union and levy fines of up to 2 per cent of a company’s revenue that violates Europe’s data protection laws.

The new measures would prohibit the use of a range of standard Web tracking and profiling practices that companies use to produce targeted advertising unless consumers give their explicit prior consent.

The bill would also grant European consumers a fundamental new right: data portability, or the right to easily transfer one’s personal posts, photos and video from one online service site to another.

A coalition of US, Asian and European businesses and advertisers have criticized the proposed plan, which would give Europeans much stronger legal protections to control their online identities than people elsewhere. However, the enactment of these laws is very good news for consumers concerned about the lack of regulation regarding data collection and user’s tracking on the interned and on social networks.

The European Parliament will vote on the proposal in April, and a final agreement with the upper house is expected later this year.

Governmental Intrusions, Twitter and the Right to Privacy

Malcolm Harris, one of about 700 protesters who participated in the Occupy movement march along the Brooklyn Bridge last October, was subsequently arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The prosecutor in the case subpoenaed hundreds of Twitter messages alleging that they would show that the police did not lead protesters off the bridge’s pedestrian path and then arrest them, an argument that Mr. Harris was expected to make at trial.

Although Twitter originally refused, eventually, the criminal court Judge demanded that Twitter release the data or hand over its confidential earnings statements from the last two quarters so he could determine how much of a fine to levy against the company. Twitter, which keeps such financial data secret, eventually produced the  data.

The judge’s ruling said that, “If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to the world. This is not the same as a private e-mail, a private direct message, a private chat, or any of the other readily available ways to have a private conversation via the internet that now exist. Those private dialogues would require a warrant based on probable cause in order to access the relevant information.”

In its appeal, Twitter wrote that Harris’ tweets are protected by the Fourth Amendment “because the government admits that it cannot publicly access them, thus establishing that the defendant maintains a reasonable expectation of privacy in his communications.” The Twitter accounts in question have been closed and are no longer publicly available.

Technology that allows for the invasion of privacy evolves significantly faster than privacy protecting laws, and as a result, the laws are almost always reactive to these new legal scenarios and often rushed to meet the urgency of the case at hand. In this particular case, the question is whether a message on Twitter that a person posts for his followers is the same as a message “gifted to the world” as the Judge stated in his ruling, for which there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

To the extent that Twitter allows a user to block a follower, the user has an expectation of privacy regarding his messages. I am pretty sure that Mr. Harris would have blocked a government representative who wanted to become a follower of his tweets.

Under these circumstances, did his messages become public? Were his messages “gifted to the world,” or are his messages more like emails, that would require the government to obtain a warrant to have access to them?