Twitter Eavesdrops on Direct Messages, Class Action Alleges

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Twitter is facing a potential class action lawsuit in California federal court alleging the social media site illegally eavesdrops on private messages.

Plaintiff Wilford Raney alleges in the Twitter class action lawsuit that the social media company monitors private messages sent by users and even changes the links sent within messages for the benefit of the company.

Raney says Twitter intercepts the message, reads it, and edits the hyperlinks sent thought direct messaging and replaces them with their own custom links, forcing the links to be monitored by Twitter’s analytics before allowing the clickthroughs to the original websites.

According to the Twitter class action lawsuit, by having traffic go to Twitter before being directed to the intended website, this increases Twitter’s perceived value to third-party websites for increased referral traffic. This also benefits Twitter’s advertising rates for the company, as they can charge a premium for being perceived as having an increased presence within electronic media.

Twitter has always made tweets public as part of the way their platform operates. Twitter compiles information on what topics are trending and uses the information for advertising and marketing purposes.

Twitter is also responsible for directing a high volume of traffic for other websites, and many of the sites profit from the revenue generated by advertisements shown to website visitors. When Twitter was in its infancy, there was not a way to consistently measure referrals from Twitter to other websites. To remedy that issue, the company began replacing links through a proprietary link service so that the websites could see that the traffic had originated from Twitter.

According to the Twitter privacy class action lawsuit, Twitter does disclose that they change the links in public tweets, but the company has not disclosed that it changes links in private messages called “Direct Messages.” To Raney and many others, the “Talk Privately” feature was thought to mean just that. Twitter allegedly never obtains user consent to have this control over private messages.

With respect to the Twitter class action lawsuit, Raney hopes to certify both a sender Class for those who sent messages, as well as a recipient Class for those who received messages where Twitter was not supposed to be an intended recipient.

On behalf of the potential Classes, Raney brings several counts against Twitter for violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CPIA).

In terms of relief, Raney is seeking an award of actual damages for $100 per Class Member per day for each day of Twitter’s alleged violations, or $10,000, whichever is greater. Additionally, the plaintiff is seeking an award of statutory damages in the amount of $5,000 per Class Member as well as punitive damages in an amount to be determined at the trial.

While not every Twitter user accesses the Direct Messages functionality of Twitter, the class size is potentially huge. Twitter has over 1 billion registered users and 316 million active users. Each day, over 500 million tweets are transmitted every day.

Raney is represented by Samuel M. Lasser, Rafey S. Balabanian, Alexander T.H. Nguyen and Amir C. Missaghi of Edelson PC.

The Twitter Privacy Class Action Lawsuit is Wilford Raney, et al. v. Twitter Inc., Case No. 3:15-cv-04191, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

UPDATE: On Jan. 14, 2016, plaintiff Raney decided to voluntarily drop the potential class action lawsuit.