What I'm Working On for ATTW: Escaping PRISM

What Twitter has to Teach Us about Data and Privacy in the 21st Century

When news leaked in June of 2013 about the NSA’s  secret data gathering program PRISM, which was aimed at trawling online spaces for suspicious communications without even the most rudimentary nods to due process or probable cause, one major tech company was noticeably absent from the list of participating companies. Despite accruing user information, including location data, on approximately 500 million users, Twitter has long resisted governmental requests for user data. How did Twitter manage to escape participating in the NSA program’s information grab? More specifically, do Twitter’s privacy policies and official communications about user privacy communicate a peculiar attitude toward privacy that differs from their social media counterparts?

In order to understand how Twitter managed to resist the NSA’s PRISM data grab, this presentation examines two articulations of Twitter’s view of privacy: the official Privacy Policy and Twitter’s biannual Twitter Transparency Report. The first third of the presentation offers a comparison between Twitter’s Privacy Policy and social media peer Facebook, paying particular attention to Twitter’s emphasis on user rights, something notably absent from Facebook’s policy. The second third of the presentation examines the most recent Twitter Transparency Report, which covers the first half of 2013, and suggests that the rationale behind the report, which is still in its infancy, offers important insight into the company’s commitment to protect user information. The final third of the presentation presents a heuristic for social media users and technical communicators to assess privacy policies in the hopes that better understanding the privacy policies of the digital spaces we inhabit might allow consumers to make more informed decisions and technical writers to help construct more ethical privacy policies.