White House's Plan on Social Media: Privacy Intrusion or Paranoia

National Legal and Policy Center announced that they had uncovered a plan by the White House Ne Media operation to conduct a "massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites." The scope is to include 7 major social networking websites including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, Vimeo, and YouTube.

White House already archives content on the 7 social networking sites where it "maintains a presence". The contractor's role is help White House comply the Presidential Records Act, which requires content of Executive Office of the President to be kept on record.

Where it becomes ambiguous is the scope of content to be archived. White House has not confirmed or commented on the story.

National Legal and Policy Center's Ken Boehm noted the troubling issues include:

The last point "with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information", however, is no where to be found on the original document where he claimed to have sited from.

Claims of White House's plan to archive all content on social media seem to have been blown out of proportion. If the White House indeed is trying to material belongs to and related to EOP that exist in the public domain, the plan would be fully consistent with White House's standard procedure. In fact, the practice would be perfectly legal for anyone. Think of it as archiving your own Facebook content.

With a closer look into the National Legal and Policy Center, I found that it is a front group funded by conservative political and policy lobbying organization, according to SourceWatch.

Perhaps it would be wise to pause before jumping to conclusion on what the White House is doing. Intrusion of privacy or Big Brother paranoia? Too early to tell.