Facebook and the New York district attorney's office are in a bitter fight over a privacy
question that was bound to come up sooner or later in the digital age: Does a government
demand for the entire contents of hundreds of Facebook accounts amount to an illegal
search of people's digital homes, and can a service provider like Facebook do anything to
stop it?
In confidential legal documents unsealed Wednesday, Facebook argues that Manhattan
prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of its users last year by demanding the nearly
complete account data of 381 people, from pages they liked to their photos and private
messages.
When the social networking company fought the data demands, a New York judge, Supreme
Court Justice Melissa C. Jackson, ruled that Facebook had no standing to contest the search
warrants since it was simply an online repository of data, not a target of the criminal
investigation. To protect the secrecy of the investigation, the judge also barred the company
from informing the affected users, a decision that also prevented the individuals from fighting
the data requests themselves.
Late Wednesday, a few days after Facebook filed an appeal on the constitutional issues, the
court unsealed the case, allowing the company to discuss it and inform the affected users.
The case pits the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches by the
government against the needs of prosecutors to seek evidence from the digital sources
where people increasingly store their most sensitive data. Facebook is the world's largest
social network, with about 1.28 billion active users worldwide, and it accounted for about 1 of
every 6 minutes Americans spent online in December
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