Twitter is being taken to court by an account holder who says the social networking service “surreptitiously eavesdrops” on supposedly private messages sent between users.
Attorneys for Wilford Raney, a Twitter user since 2009, filed a complaint in federal court this week that accuses the service of violating state and federal privacy laws.
Twitter is “systematically intercepting, reading and altering” communications, according to the suit, evidenced by an automatic feature that converts web addresses that are shared privately by users.
When an account holder posts a link, either publicly or privately, the address is instantly altered so that an individual who opens it is first taken to a site run by Twitter, t.co, before being forwarded to the intended page. The feature exists to automatically shorten links in order to help adhere to Twitter’s limit of 140 characters per tweet, but also shows that Twitter is the source of the traffic, in turn allowing the company to “negotiate better advertising rates,” the lawsuit alleges.
“But while Twitter acknowledges and publicizes that it replaces hyperlinks found with tweets, it does not disclose that it looks for and replaces hyperlinks in private direct messages. On the contrary, Twitter represents that the private messages it offers, called ’Direct Messages,’ are readable only by the sender and recipients. Yet, a close look at the Direct Message service reveals that Twitter intercepts and reads every message” in order to convert links, the suit claims.
Attorneys for the plaintiff say this “invasive scanning” contradicts Twitter’s promise of providing a private way of communicating, and have asked the District Court for the Northern District of California to accept the claim and elevate it to class-action status. If approved, any of the 316 million active Twitter users who have sent or received a direct message may be eligible to join in.
But Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor and a former scholar with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, told USA Today that Twitter’s practice is likely on par with Google’s process of automatically scanning Gmail messages for the sake of delivering targeted ads. That tactic was the subject of a lawsuit as well, but a federal judge ultimately decided last year not to grant the matter class-action status.
“We believe these claims are meritless and we intend to fight them,” Twitter said in a statement this week.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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