Twitter recently launched a defense of one of its users whose tweets were accessed by New York City police to determine his role in an Occupy Wall Street march last year.
The defense followed a lower court's ruling that tweets are not protected by the state or federal constitution, according to a report from
CNET. Prosecutors have asked the popular social networking site to turn over all user data, including email addresses and specific tweets, for activist Malcolm Harris.
Experts say that the defense of a user by the social network could prove important for future online privacy cases, particularly if the company can establish that there should be protections of data under the Fourth Amendment, the report said. The American Civil Liberties Union recently announced it would file a brief in support of Twitter's defense as well.
Eduard Goodman, the chief privacy officer for
Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the ways consumers can have their personal information exposed online, and what they can do to increase the security of that data.
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