14 DAY TRIAL // The tech industry is uniting to support Facebook in its fight to protect user data from government investigations after the New York district attorney’s office used a bulk warrant asking for information on 381 Facebook users.
A long list of companies, including Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Microsoft, Yelp, as well as the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union, have filed amicus briefs to support the social network giant.
The group argues that such bulk warrants as the one used by the New York district attorney’s office are problematic because they are often attached to a gag order that prevents companies from alerting users that they are under investigation.
“The sensitive information we share on social media, like where we’re going and who we’re seeing, our political affiliations, our hobbies and our private conversations, are owed the highest level of protection. Government entities shouldn’t be conducting broad fishing expeditions into our personal and social conversations with our family and friends with no regard to our privacy,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman in a statement.
What’s worse, the New York Civil Liberties Union points out that that the NYDA has not provided any reasonable expectation that they won’t be doing the same thing in the future, which is concerning considering the amount of private information people store on Facebook and intend to keep away from prying eyes.
“Only 62 of the Facebook users targeted by the warrants in this case have been charged with a crime. The other 319 users have had their personal information seized and, under the government’s view of the law, would never know that the government has obtained that information and continues to possess it long after the government has concluded its investigation,” reads an amicus filed by multiple companies, including Google and Microsoft.
The warrants directed at Facebook included a wide range of user data, including private messages, chat histories, photos, comments posted on pages of their friends and family, as well as the membership lists of groups that they have joined, effectively violating the privacy of hundreds other people who may have been in touch with the suspects.
The fact that tech companies stand together against such overreaching orders is encouraging and we’ve seen a similar stance on many privacy-threatening situations over the past few months, where authorities simply do not care about these companies’ job of protecting their users’ privacy.