“But while Twitter reads, monitors and, at times, alters Direct Messages, Twitter never obtains its users’ consent to do so”.
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The secret surveillance supposedly takes place whenever a user includes a hyerlink in his or her message. For example, a link to a New York Times article will display as linking to the newspaper’s own link-shortening service at nyti.ms, but will in fact go through a custom Twitter t.co domain.
Twitter is the target of a class action lawsuit which accuses the micro-blogging website of eavesdropping on a user’s direct messages.
This recent lawsuit brought against Twitter is almost identical to what Google faced, and the social network should be extremely open to the idea of using the same arguments in its own legal battle. Direct messages are encrypted between user’s phones and Twitter’s central servers, but similar to Gmail, the company still has the ability to observe the messages off company servers.
Twitter represents its direct message feature as a private alternative to tweets, saying that “With Direct Messages on Twitter, [users] can communicate privately” and “Direct message can only be seen between the people included”.
However, he added that although it’s not “legally actionable” when an algorithm, and not a person, scans messages, it does not mean that in certain circumstances an algorithm might not cause harm.
Taking into account those that sent and received messages, it could prove very costly for Twitter.
A spokesperson for the popular microblogging platform told The Wall Street Journal that the claims are meritless and that they intend to fight them. It also seeks redress and statutory damages under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy law.
Since Google’s activity wasn’t an instrumental part of the sending of emails in its Gmail service, the “ordinary course of business” exception didn’t apply (though the action later failed to secure class action certification, which essentially doomed the case).
It seems like an innocuous maneuver – after all, there’s no indication that Twitter is actually parsing through personal conversations for content. If what the suit says is true, Twitter is automatically changing hyperlinks to boost its revenues, and that’s it. But federal law prohibiting wiretapping doesn’t make a distinction.
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The claim can be read in full via The Hollywood Reporter on documentcloud.
