eDiscovery Daily Blog

Social Tech eDiscovery: Twitter Guidelines for Law Enforcement

Tuesday, I provided information regarding Facebook’s Law Enforcement page with information about serving civil subpoenas. Facebook provides quite a bit of useful information regarding serving subpoenas, including the address for registered agent (to process requests), information required to identify users, fee for processing, turnaround time, and fee to expedite responses. Facebook is very informative with regard to how subpoenas are handled in terms of cost and time to process.

So, it makes sense to look at other popular social media sites to see how they are handling this issue. Twitter is probably right behind Facebook in terms of popularity in the social media world and they have a “Guidelines for Law Enforcement” page to address requests for non-public information for Twitter users.

As the Twitter policy notes, most Twitter profile information is public, so anyone can see it. A Twitter profile contains a profile image, background image, as well as the status updates, which, of course, they call “tweets”. In addition, the user has the option to fill out location, a URL, and a short “bio” section about themselves for display on their public profile. Non-public information includes “log data” such as IP address, browser type, the referring domain, pages visited, search terms and interactions with advertisements (as noted in their Privacy Policy page).

Twitter doesn’t provide any cost information regarding processing subpoena requests, nor do they address standard turnaround times or fees to expedite processing. Their policy is to notify users of requests for their information prior to disclosure unless they are prohibited from doing so by statute or court order and they do require the URL of the Twitter profile in question to process any subpoena requests. They do provide email, fax and physical address contact information to address user information requests. FYI, only email from law enforcement domains will be accepted via the email address. Preservation requests must be signed with a valid return email address, and sent on law enforcement letterhead. Non-law enforcement requests should be sent through regular support methods (via their main support page).

So, what do you think? Have you ever needed to file a subpoena on Twitter? Please share, or let us know or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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