IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 80
and went public in 2013 [36]. The company is now
worth over 10 billion dollars and has 230 million active
users per month [36].
Twitter takes a different approach to privacy than its
other social media counterparts. Twitter assumes that
any information posted on their service is information
the individual wishes to make public. As such, Twitter
collects nearly any type of information possible to gen-
erate using their platform. For a complete summary of
the information that Twitter collects see Table 1. All
information on profiles, tweets, people followed,
retweets, favorites, the user's name, and username is
considered public by default. Twitter only allows the
option to keep one-on-one messages private [51]. All
meta-data generated by the user can also be accessed
easily by third parties using the Twitter application pro-
graming interface (API), which Twitter makes available
to universities and other institutions that conduct
research. Accessible information can include the user's
Internet Protocol (IP) address and his/her location. Twit-
ter reserves the right to share all information within the
company as well as with third parties in order to use tar-
geted advertising, improve their services, and comply
with law enforcement agencies [51].
Twitter will disclose any information to law enforce-
ment as long as they believe it is necessary to comply
with the law/regulation; protect persons from harm and
their rights; protect the rights and property of Twitter;
and to prevent fraud, technical, and security issues [51].
Cookies are used on Twitter to collect information
about user's browsing habits when not active on the
Twitter platform, as well as to track what links are
clicked in relation to advertisements. However, cookies
are not required as part of Twitter with many services
still functioning properly if the user decides to disable
them [51]
There is no mention in Twitter's policy of security
measures used to protect the user's data. This could
possibly be because Twitter is public by default, and
they do not feel there is a need to invest in forms of
information security. The user has some control over
making certain aspects of their profile private, however,
there is not any opt-out function in regards to the data
that Twitter collects [51]. The best practice for this plat-
form is to abstain from sharing information that is
deemed private. The user is given the option to disable
their account. If a user decides to disable their account
they have 30 days to reinstate it before Twitter starts to
process of deleting the account which can take up to
seven days [51]. After the account is deleted, tweets
could still be accessed through search engines and
other third parties if they saved the account informa-
tion. There is no guarantee that the information will ever
truly be deleted.
80
Analysis of Privacy Policies
The privacy policies of each web platform discussed are
extensive and have a few areas that are relatively the
same. Each privacy policy has a section on data collec-
tion, data storage, use of collected data, data sharing,
law enforcement, and account deletion. In addition to
these main areas, each platform has a separate policy
dedicated to the use of cookies. For the most part the
sections on law enforcement and cookies do not devi-
ate much from platform to platform. The platforms do
vary on other aspects of the privacy policies. There are
minor differences in how the privacy policies address
information storage and account deletion. The major dif-
ferences in the privacy policies are found in data collec-
tion, sharing of data, and data security.
Data Collection
Each web platform collects data on the device used by
the user, user location, and information used in account
creation. This data collection breaks down to the user's
IP address, general location (city, state, and country),
email address, name, birthdate, type of computer, oper-
ating system, and web browser. Beyond those basic ele-
ments each privacy policy varies widely on the specific
data they collect. Part of this is due to each platform
having its own uses and expectations by the users. How-
ever, every platform uses the same three main methods
of collecting user information: registration, user IP
address trace, and search track recording cookies [5].
We found that the platform that collects the largest
variety of data is Facebook. Facebook collects every
piece of information that the user posts on the site, any
information posted about that user, payment informa-
tion, and also stretches to collect information about
their general Internet usage. Since the main purpose of
Facebook is social networking, the type of information
that the user posts can vary widely and is likely to
include potentially stigmatizing information [52]. Cur-
rently Facebook has the largest membership of all of
the platforms discussed, with users disclosing in depth
details of their lives. These circumstances make it pos-
sible that Facebook could also be collecting the largest
amount of data of any platform discussed here.
Even though Google's privacy policy covers all of
their web platforms, they collect the least amount of
information. Google has two different social media plat-
forms, Google+ and YouTube. Google+'s adoption has
not been nearly as widespread as the other web plat-
forms and consequently there is less information there
to collected [43]. YouTube would allow for a large
amount of data collection, but Google does not collect
user generated content unlike all of the other web plat-
forms discussed. The majority of data that Google col-
lects originates from its main function: search. Google
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