Michael Zimmer.org

Anthony Hoffmann, a UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies PhD student, has posted an excellent analysis of the Twitter-Library of Congress deal, in 4 parts, at his blog Sex, Drugs & Intellectual Freedom:

Part I: Intro and Privacy Roundup: Hoffmann discusses how the LoC acquisition of the public Twitter archive “directly confronts a number of unresolved (and hotly contested) practical and conceptual issues concerning privacy today”.
Part II: Digital Divides and the Cultural Record: Hoffmann critiques the oft-repeated rhetoric that the Twitter archive represents the collective thoughts and utterances of “ordinary people”, …

While my Freedom of Information Act request to the Library of Congress requesting a copy of its agreement with Twitter remains unanswered, interviews with Library personnel at The American Prospect and Ars Technica provide us some insight into the nature of the agreement and the plans for the data.

Today’s announcement that the Library of Congress will be archiving all public tweets since March 2006 prompts many questions. But most people, I suspect, are comfortable with the concept since the LOC is only archiving public tweets; those who decided to restrict the visibility of their Twitter traffic can rest assured that their chatter won’t be included in this mass collection of public utterances.
Or can they?
Consider this scenario:

You decide to protect your privacy/visibility and keep your tweet stream protected.
I send a request to follow you. You accept. I now receive …

The Library of Congress tweeted today that they are acquiring the entire archive of public Twitter activity since March 2006.

While the LOC stresses that they’re doing this for historical and scholarly reasons, there are major implications regarding the privacy and contextual expectations of Twitter users. Now, suddenly, all their tweets are being archived by the world’s largest library. Yes, the tweets were always public and discoverable, but the searchability and accessibility will increase drastically if/when the LOC processes this archive.

Due to these concerns, there are some vital questions that must be addressed prior to implementing such an expansive archive of public Twitter activity.

While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining specific, informed consent by the subjects. Many in the room felt that consent was not necessary since the tweets are public, a conscious choice made by the user to allow the whole world see her activity. In short, by not restricting …

Speaking of Lessig, two interesting cases emerged this week that help illustrate Lessig’s position that, when thinking about the architecture of cyberspace,  “code is law.”
In Code, Lessig argues that all of the rules, tendencies, affordances, and constraints of/in cyberspace are the result of human decisions, actions, and, ultimately, code. What we can and cannot do there is governed by the underlying code of all of the programs and protocols that make up the Internet, which can, alternatively or simultaneously, permit and restrict certain human actions:
In real space recognize how …

On the heels of the Twitter privacy flaw, where users’ “protected” data streams are automatically accessible to third parties via their API, Facebook has now been criticized for automatically enrolling all of its users (including me, apparently) in their new data-sharing API infrastructure. From Threat Level:
Popular social networking site Facebook announced, to great fanfair, a system that lets developers build new applications using Facebook user profile data, but one privacy advocate charges that the site failed to give users enough notice about how their personal data can end upon new …

I’ve just recently started experimenting with Twitter – that sexy new thing that lets users send 140-word messages of what they’re doing at any given moment to the world. Some users, of course, prefer to keep the mundane details of their lives among friends, and Twitter offers privacy settings so one’s stream is only available to her friends, not the entire universe.
But – not altogether surprisingly – a glitch has been discovered:
Twitter, the popular messaging site which has gained traction among the technorati, has come in for plenty of criticism …