No Privacy Expectation for IP Address on Twitter
Three Twitter users who are under investigation in connection with WikiLeaks have no legitimate expectation of privacy in their internet protocol (IP) addresses and the locations of their computers, a federal judge has found.
The court denied a request by the trio to quash an order requiring Twitter to turn over the information to the government under the Stored Communications Act. The Act permits the government to make an ex parte request to a court for electronic records. The records sought included the user names, IP addresses, connection records, records of session times and durations, and non-content information associated with the contents such as the source and destination email addresses. The government is not required to notify the party whose records are sought.
The magistrate and the court rejected the trio’s claim that the order violated the Fourth Amendment because it was a warrantless search. The court found that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy for the IP addresses because they were voluntarily conveyed to Twitter. The court noted that Twitter’s Privacy Policy discloses that it collects the physical location, IP address, browser type, the referring domain, pages visited, and other information. By accepting the Privacy Policy, the trio voluntarily assented to third party access to the information, thereby giving up any expectation of privacy in the information.
The court further found that there is “less privacy to IP addresses” than for telephone numbers. “If the user is communicating over the Internet, intermediary computers and the destination computer must know the IP address as a condition of communication. Under the Fourth Amendment, that fact renders unreasonable any expectation of privacy in the IP address.”
The trio also argued that by providing the IP addresses, the government could track their locations in and between particular private spaces over a period of time, thereby violating their locational privacy. The court rejected the argument, noting that the trio “transmitted their IP address information out of any private spaces and into the Internet. In so doing, Petitioners exposed their IP address information to all routers conveying their Internet traffic to Twitter.” The court wrote that even if the IP addresses could be combined with other information to “pinpoint” the trio’s location, it would not “infringe a locational privacy interested protected by the Fourth Amendment.”
In re Application of the United States of America for an Order Pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §2703(d), E.D. Virginia, No. 10-GJ-3793, Issued Nov. 10, 2011.