While states are busy passing legislation to protect your passwords from employers and schools, Americans still have little in the way of guaranteed privacy on social media sites. The police can rely on a 1986 law that was extended to the internet by the Patriot Act to conduct surveillance on social media sites without a warrant. Declan McCullagh provides more details in his article “Feds Snoop on Social-Network Accounts Without Warrants.”
This is a subject that most people don’t want to contemplate, but it’s definitely something you should be thinking about. Who controls your posts on Facebook and Twitter after you die? As of right now, it is the social media site itself. The sites are the ones who set the policy, but a push for new federal regulations may change that. This could be an issue of particular concern when it comes to issues of intellectual property. What about any material that might be copyrighted? It’s not just a matter of personal information that may be stored online; there may also be valuable intellectual property stored there. ScienceDaily’s article “Federal Law Needed to Safeguard ‘Digital Afterlives’, Expert Argues” draws on the article “Facebook’s Afterlife” by Jason Mazzone.