Fine Print Friday is a weekly column where I examine and analyze Contracts that affect many of us in our daily lives. Each installment will point out a few interesting provisions the average reader may not have noticed.
Fine Print Friday: Twitter Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Twitter has quickly become the new standard for quick communication with both friends and strangers. It’s power to aggregate knowledge and affect social change has been shown to be great, as well as its ability to catalog the most mundane details of people’s lives.
This week’s Fine Print Friday addresses what permissions you give every time you tweet, and ends with a couple considerations for those of you who haven’t thought through the consequences of stream-of-consciousness tweeting.
1. You Own Your Content…but Twitter gets a license to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods.” Additionally, that content is instantly available throughout the world, and is searchable through Twitter. Some intellectual property attorneys might take issue with the idea that you own your content if it can be sent around the world for anyone else to use and you can’t take it off Twitter’s servers. But that’s the deal: you post it, everyone can see it and do with it what they wish. You can still use it for yourself, but it’s not exclusive anymore.
2. Your Content May Be Altered. Although you own your content, Twitter can “modify or adapt your Content.” Does this mean it is no longer your content? Perhaps. It’s not clear that modified content will still be attributed to you. How comfortable are you with having your tweets modified and then still presented as being yours? There are no answers here, but at least one person (Shirley Sherrod) has been severely wronged lately due to modification of her content.
3. Copyright Law is Followed. This is a good thing. Twitter will, upon proper notice (typically meaning that it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – PDF), take down tweets that violate copyright law (including impersonations). Of course, if you tweet your own copyrighted material, that probably won’t be subject to this term, and you probably can’t expect it to be taken down.
There is not actually all that much in Twitter’s Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or Rules that is surprising or concerning. The biggest concern for anyone using Twitter’s service should really be whether you want that information to be available to the entire world for the rest of time. Given that the Library of Congress is now archiving tweets, and that all tweets are searchable on Twitter’s website (unless their authors have changed their privacy settings), anything you tweet will be available forever for everyone to see, and it’s probably a good idea to double-check if you want that statement to be attributed to you for the rest of your life and beyond.
How does this strike you? Should people be more careful with their tweets? Has your content ever been altered? Let us know in the comments below. And as always, if there is a subject you would like to see on Fine Print Friday, let me know and I will add it to the list.
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