Google?s latest biannual report on government information requests into its users, released this week, highlights for the first time how outdated privacy laws allow access to users? information with only a subpoena ? not a warrant, the standard in almost all other searches.
In the United States, from July to December 2012, 68 percent of government requests came via subpoena, Google reported. Just 22 percent were through search warrants. (The remaining 10 percent were legal processes Google said were ?difficult to categorize.?) In total, government agencies made 14,791 requests on U.S. users and accounts, and Google complied with 90 percent of them.
Google products ? search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, etc. ? are accessed billions of time every day by users around the world. Most require accounts, and so, to facilitate better advertising, the search giant stores users? online activity.
But governments want that information too, especially when investigating crimes. Out-of-date digital privacy laws allow law enforcement agencies to sidestep the usual constitutional requirement to obtain a search and use only a subpoena, a document that can be issued by a prosecutor in private, not an impartial judge in open court.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the law that governs such requests, was passed in 1986, well before terms like ?e-mail? or ?cloud computing? were common. Law enforcement agencies have interpreted the language to mean that they can treat any e-mail older than 180 days stored on a third-party server (such as Gmail or Hotmail) to be abandoned.
Therefore, the logic goes, it has no reasonable expectation of privacy ? a key ingredient to the ?unreasonable? portion of a search ? and can be subpoenaed.
The legislation is slowly being challenged in various Circuit Courts of Appeals around the country. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who wrote the Privacy Act, attempted to pass some updates in November, but the proceedings were lost among year-end congressional wrangling and the presidential election. The senator said reforming the law is one of his top priorities in 2013.
Google should be commended for noting that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act?s weaknesses are the reason they have so many requests in the United States. Many people do not realize that law enforcement agencies have such access to their private digital information.
It?s no doubt cumbersome for businesses such as Google to deal with these requests and risk jeopardizing user trust ? a touchy subject for the company already, as it grapples with its own privacy standards regarding using user information for more targeted advertising.
A final note: Though Google?s report on information requests has much more detail, both Twitter and LinkedIn publish similar reports. Facebook, with a billion users, does not.
Video tweets on Vine: You know how there are animated GIFs that spread like wildfire across the Internet for every event? A recent example: The one of San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh melting down over a referee?s call during Sunday?s NFC Championship game. That was truly animated.
Now, Twitter is getting into the animated GIF game with an app called Vine, which lets you create and post short, looping videos.
The San Francisco company officially launched Vine Thursday, though it reportedly bought the three-person New York startup back in October. Terms of the deal were not announced.
?Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine? ? they last only six seconds or less ? ?inspires creativity,? Michael Sippey, Twitter vice president of product, wrote in a blog post. ?Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.?
Posts on Vine, available only for the iPhone and iPod Touch for the moment, ?are about abbreviation ? the shortened form of something larger,? Vine co-founder and General Manager Dom Hofmann said in a post announcing Vine had joined Twitter, the company that made digital brevity a business model.
?They?re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They?re quirky, and we think that?s part of what makes them so special.?
Twitter Chairman Jack Dorsey went a bit further. Vine, he said, ?brings an entirely new art form to the world.?
Whether that?s truly the case remains to be seen, but these little ?snacks? of video do tap into the popularity of animated GIFs and could help Twitter drive up overall engagement in the microblogging service, although the app does allow you to post simultaneously on Facebook as well.
And what about the bottom line? Artful or not, it may not be too long before advertisers see ?sponsored? Vine videos as a way to get their messages out.
- Caleb Garling and Benny Evangelista
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