Facebook More Willing to Cooperate with Law Enforcement Agencies than Twitter

Social networks are a big part of many people's lives and plenty of other people use them occasionally. This makes them a valuable source of information for anyone interested, including government agencies. The Internet rights watchdog, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), has requested several US government bodies to release their internal policies regarding social networks and, from the documents it has gotten so far, it’s clear that, while social networking is increasingly important for plenty of agencies, there is a great discrepancy between them.

One of the documents was a 2009 training course for the IRS, which is very though in explaining the various online tools that agents might use, from Street View to Twitter. "The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information. Its policies generally limit employees to using publicly available information," the EFF writes.

The EFF says agencies like U.S. Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are at the other end of the spectrum, which appears to not have any sort of regulations or directives when it comes to social networks.

When it comes to the social networks themselves, there is a bit of a gap between how they handle requests from government agencies. Twitter fares the best when it comes to data protection. For one, it doesn't store any information for extended periods of time without proper requests from officials and it also has a "stated policy of producing data only in response to legal process."

MySpace also fares quite well, as it requires a search warrant before releasing any private messages newer than 181 days. On the other hand, Facebook seems to be much more cooperative with law enforcement agencies with the released document claiming that the social network is "often cooperative with emergency requests." It was pretty much known that social networks, just like any other company, do share information at the government's request, but now you have it coming from official sources.