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Friends With Benefits (How Privacy Law Evolves for Social Media)

A few weeks ago I examined how copyright law — like most legal subjects dealing with technology — is lagging behind the fast-moving and disruptive changes wrought by social media to old legal rules for determining rights to Internet content. Part of my critique was that in deciding ownership of user-generated content (UGC), courts have not yet evaluated the difference between posting content “in the clear” and restricting content to “friends” or some other defined class far smaller than the entire Internet community.

Things may at last be getting a bit more settled. A New Jersey federal court ruled last Tuesday that non-public Facebook wall posts are covered by the federal Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 2701-12). The SCA, part of the broader Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 2510 et seq.) that addresses both “the privacy expectations of citizens and the legitimate needs of law enforcement,” protects confidentiality of the contents of “electronic communication services,” providing criminal penalties and a civil remedy for unauthorized access. It’s a decades-old 1986 law that was enacted well before the commercial Internet and either email or social media had become ubiquitous. Yet by interpreting the statute, in light of its purpose, to apply to new technologies, District Judge William J. Martini has done Internet users, and common sense, a great service.

Plaintiff Deborah Ehling, a registered nurse, paramedic and president of her local EMT union — apparently a thorn in the side of her hospital employer for pursuing EPA and labor complaints as well — posted a comment to her Facebook wall implying that the paramedics who arrived on the scene of a shooting at the D.C. Holocaust museum should have let the shooter die. Unbeknownst to Ehling, a co-worker with whom she was Facebook friends had been taking screenshots of her profile page and sending them to a manager at Ehling’s hospital.

Ehling was temporarily suspended with pay and received a memo stating that the hospital was concerned that her comment reflected a deliberate disregard for patient safety. After an unsuccessful NLRB complaint based on labor law, Ehling’s federal lawsuit alleged that the hospital had violated the SCA by improperly accessing her Facebook wall post about the museum shooting, contending that her Facebook wall posts were covered by the law because she selected privacy settings limiting access to her Facebook page to her Facebook friends.

Judge Martini concluded that the SCA indeed applies to Facebook wall posts when a user has limited his or her privacy settings. He noted that “Facebook has customizable privacy settings that allow users to restrict access to their Facebook content. Access can be limited to the user’s Facebook friends, to particular groups or individuals, or to just the user.” Therefore, because the plaintiff selected privacy settings that limited access to her Facebook wall content only to friends and “did not add any MONOC [hospital] managers as Facebook friends,” she met the criteria for SCA-covered private communications.

Facebook wall posts that are configured to be private are, by definition, not accessible to the general public. The touchstone of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is that it protects private information. The language of the statute makes clear that the statute’s purpose is to protect information that the communicator took steps to keep private. See 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(g)(i) (there is no protection for information that is “configured [to be] readily accessible to the general public”). [The] SCA confirms that information is protectable as long as the communicator actively restricts the public from accessing the information.

That’s a bold move by a jurist sensitive to the constraints on Congress, especially one as polarized as we have in America today. It reflects a willingness to adapt the law to changing technology by application of the basic principles and purposes of legislation, even if the statutory framework is old and its language somewhat archaic. As Judge Martini observed with a bit of consternation, “Despite the rapid evolution of computer and networking technology since the SCA’s adoption, its language has remained surprisingly static.” Thus, the “task of adapting the Act’s language to modern technology has fallen largely upon the courts.”

Continue reading Friends With Benefits (How Privacy Law Evolves for Social Media)

Top 4 Social Media Law Cases of 2010

If you’re read my The Law of Social Media essays or presentations, you probably know there have been few serious cases yet establishing law specifically targeting social media. One can apply basic principles to predict what courts will do, but so far there are only a handful of reported decisions that say anything at all about social media.

That does not mean nothing happened in 2010 in this rapidly evolving area. In my view, the most important developments are reflected in these four cases:

1. The Food & Drug Administration’s citation of Novartis for Facebook content that lacked required pharmaceutical side-effect warnings and disclaimers, and the agency’s subsequent delay in release of social media “guidance” for pharma until Q1 2011. The case illustrates that heavily regulated industries face special risks and burdens in structuring social media marketing campaigns.

2. The assertion of jurisdiction by the National Labor Relations Board over “protected activity” of employees (discussing working conditions, for instance) on Facebook, even where the company is not unionized. This shows that, although equal employment issues still dominate employers’ use of social media in hiring and firing, there may be limits to which companies can penalize workers for their social media posts if the content is work-related.

3. The New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision in in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc., reversing the older, black-letter rule that employees have no privacy interests at all in employer-provided email systems.

4. The decision just days ago by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in United States v. Warshak, holding that the 20-year old Stored Communications Act’s approval of warrantless seizure by the government of user emails is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. This is the first judicial opinion that extends “reasonable expectations of privacy” from snail mail and the telephone to email, using a principled and thoughtful constitutional analysis.

Since the advent of email, the telephone call and the letter have waned in importance, and an explosion of Internet-based communication has taken place. People are now able to send sensitive and intimate information, instantaneously, to friends, family, and colleagues half a world away. Lovers exchange sweet nothings, and businessmen swap ambitious plans, all with the click of a mouse button. Commerce has also taken hold in email. Online purchases are often documented in email accounts, and email is frequently used to remind patients and clients of imminent appointments.

In short, “account” is an apt word for the conglomeration of stored messages that comprises an email account, as it provides an account of its owner’s life. By obtaining access to someone’s email, government agents gain the ability to peer deeply into his activities. . . . If we accept that an email is analogous to a letter or a phone call, it is manifest that agents of the government cannot compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of an email without triggering the Fourth Amendment.

And as my friends at SiliconANGLE have observed, the same rationale should apply as well to emails stored in “the cloud” or other Web-based email systems, like Gmail and Hotmail.

* * * * * *

So there you have ’em. Not quite as interesting as the worst-dressed actress and best cinema films lists we’ll see over the next few days, but (perhaps) a bit more relevant to our daily activities on social networks and the real-time Web.

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