Facebook possibly crossing legal line on censorship


Facebook seems to always be finding itself in the legal line of fire over the way it is doing business. The latest salvo comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) over the fact that Facebook is apparently censoring private email messages between Facebook members. This practice has come to light following Facebook’s recent blocking of The Pirate Bay file sharing links on the service.

However Facebook didn’t stop with just blocking them on the public profile pages but as Wired.com editor John C. Abell found out they are also censoring the private in-service emails of it’s members.

Wired.com confirmed Facebook is blocking private messages by sending a link to a Pirate Bay torrent feed of a book in the public domain. Such content is freely available to everyone, as all copyrights have expired. Nevertheless, the message bounced twice, returning the following failure notice: “This Message Contains Blocked Content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.” (Facebook’s link-censoring system is may be just tilting at windmills, however, because removing a single vowel from the domain name lets the URL go through.)

In the case of Wired.com’s test, there were only two Facebook users who should have been aware of the content — Wired.com editor John C. Abell and his message’s intended recipient, who was sitting five feet from him — and neither had the slightest objection to it whatsoever.

Source: Ryan Singel – Wired.com

Ryan also points out in his post that while Facebook is falling back on their Terms of Service as their protection those same messages are also covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which forbids providers from intercepting user messages. Additionally

EFF lawyers suggested that the legality of Facebook’s censorship turns on Facebook’s Terms of Service, how and when the blocking takes place, and whether the messaging system affects interstate commerce (thus giving the federal government jurisdiction).

It’s not clear, however, how links to torrents are spammy, harassing or illegal. Torrents themselves are not copyright-infringing, nor would Facebook be liable for their users’ communications under federal law even if the files were infringing.

Yup, Facebook is all about openness and transparency especially when it comes to them monitoring their users.

[Facebook email graphic courtesy of Wired.com]

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