No matter how high your privacy settings are on Facebook, the government might still have access to everything you post.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, teamed with the Samuelson Law, Technology and the Public Policy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley School of Law in December 2009 to see what was going on between law enforcement agencies and social networking sites.
“To my knowledge, Twitter is the only social networking site that posts its law enforcement guides on their site,” Mark Rumold, the Foundation’s Open Government Legal Fellow, said.
Users can now find the law enforcement guides for major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace on the Foundation’s website.
Rumold said federal agencies can access any information on a social networking site that is public or searchable by Google. But anything private like a message sent between two users or something hidden to the public by higher privacy settings would require a warrant or subpoena to access. The law enforcement guides on their site show users the policy of the social networking sites to turn information over when they receive those warrants or subpoenas.
The expectation of privacy one can expect after information is posted online is something that people should be aware of, Rumold said.
“I think it’s most important to know that when you put something online, it ceases to be private – even if you have high privacy settings,” he said. “Just the fact that you put it on the social networking site, it can come back to haunt you.”
Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York , said email is another example of one not having full expectation of privacy.
“What people choose to share between one another electronically can be very private,” she said. “But the government says email does not warrant the same privacy [as postal mail.] Email doesn’t have the same expectation of privacy because you hand it over to a third party.”
Crump said electronic messaging like email is the modern equivalent of postal mail, so it should have that same level of protection to privacy.
The work the Foundation has been conducting allows people some access into what agencies are looking at and what these sites turn over, Rumold said.
“Social networking sites have information,” he said. “So if the FBI is doing an investigation, they’ll look for information there.”
The Freedom of Information Act has exceptions for law enforcement methods and techniques, Rumold said. But you can see that these agencies are looking at these sites to gather information in an investigation.
Rumold also said social networking users should be aware of their digital footprint.
“A lot of people don’t recognize the scope of info when you put something online,” he said. “Say you put a photo on Facebook – along with uploading that photo, you’re giving away the metadata in the photo that could tell what camera you used, where you took the photo, what time you uploaded the photo. There’s a huge digital footprint anytime you do anything online, and I don’t think that people recognize the scope.”
