How Private Is Facebook Under the SCA?

However, when Congress passed the SCA, the Internet was in its infancy. The few networks available to consumers, such as Prodigy and America Online, were self-contained, and most people had never heard of the term e-mail, let alone utilized the limited form of electronic messaging that existed at the time. The World Wide Web did not yet exist, and it would be nearly a decade before the introduction of the Web browser in the mid-1990s.

The two students who would later attend Stanford and embark on a research project that would eventually morph into the now ubiquitous Google were just entering their teenage years, and social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, were the stuff of imagination.

Despite huge technological advancements in the 25 years since passage of the SCA, and the ever-increasing prominence of electronic communication in our society, Congress has not amended the SCA to keep pace with changing technology. Rather, courts have had to lead the charge in applying the decades-old statute to modern Internet technology and electronic communication disclosure issues.

Recently, in Crispin v. Christian Audigier Inc., et al., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52832, 2010 WL 2293238 (C.D. Cal., May 26, 2010), the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California was tasked with application of the SCA in the context of social networking and Webmail services. Crispin involved subpoenas issued by defendants in a copyright infringement and breach of contract action to two non-party social networking service providers, Facebook and MySpace, and Media Temple, a non-party Web hosting company that provides Webmail services.

The subpoenas sought disclosure of plaintiff's private e-mail and social networking messages, as well as plaintiff's MySpace comments and Facebook wall postings. Plaintiff moved to quash the subpoenas, arguing that the communications were protected under the SCA.

In the resulting decision, District Court Judge Margaret M. Morrow thoroughly analyzed several important and timely issues, including:

• Whether a litigant has standing to move to quash subpoenas served on non-party Web hosting and social networking companies to which the litigant subscribes;
• Whether the SCA applies to these types of providers;
• Whether the SCA provides immunity for disclosure of private information when compelled by subpoena; and
• The extent to which private electronic communications and data in the custody of social networking and Webmail providers are protected.

As Webmail and social networking Web sites become more prominent in our society, it is increasingly important to fully understand these issues.

Stored Communications Act Coverage

Generally, the SCA targets two types of service providers in its attempt to protect private communications from disclosure:

1. Those that provide subscribers the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications, or “electronic communication service [ECS]” providers; and
2. Those that provide computer storage or processing services by means of an electronic communications system, or “remote computing service [RCS]” providers.

18 U.S.C. ”2510(14), (15).

The type of data to which the SCA applies depends on which type of provider is at issue. ECS providers are prohibited from knowingly divulging the contents of a communication while in “electronic storage” by that service, which includes those messages that are temporarily stored pending transmission (“in-transmission” messages), and any communications stored for purposes of backup protection.

RCS providers are prohibited from divulging the content of any electronic communication carried or maintained on its service solely for the purpose of providing storage or computer processing services, if the provider is not authorized to access the communication for other purposes. Id., ”2702(a)(1), (2).

Thus, the SCA's application to Webmail and social networking service providers such as Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace turns on whether those providers qualify as ECS or RCS providers (or, as discussed below, both).

Who Has Standing to Move to Quash?

The Crispin court first tackled the preliminary issues of standing of a social network account holder to move to quash a subpoena served on a non-party Web hosting or social networking company, and immunity from statutory disclosure restrictions when compelled by subpoena.

Regarding standing, the court found that an individual has a personal right in information in his or her profile and Inbox on a social networking site and his or her Webmail Inbox “in the same way that an individual has a personal right in employment and bank records.”

As with these other traditionally “private” records, this personal right confers standing to move to quash a subpoena seeking such information. See, Crispin at 10-11. Although a provision of the SCA provides immunity for disclosure of information compelled by subpoena, the court found that the statutory exception applied only to compliance with subpoenas issued by a governmental entity in a criminal context. The statute makes no mention of service of a civil subpoena, and the court refused to extend the exception to civil cases.

Defining Provider Status

The court next examined issues surrounding application of the SCA to Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace.

Media Temple was found to qualify as an ECS provider because it provides Webmail, a service that users can access remotely to send and receive e-mail messages. Similarly, Facebook and MySpace provide private messaging services, and thus also qualify as ECS providers.

In so finding, the court followed the “voluminous” case law precedent that establishes providers of electronic messaging services as ECS providers, but the court went further and also found Facebook and MySpace to be ECS providers in connection with Facebook's “wall posting” and MySpace's “comment posting” services. The court likened these to so-called bulletin board services, the providers of which have long been held to be ECS providers as long as the postings are restricted in some fashion and not completely public.

Since Facebook and MySpace allow users to post comments and information and to restrict access to those postings to only selected users, they qualified as ECS providers in connection with this type of service.

The Nature of the Service Provided

Having determined that Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace are subject to the SCA, the court turned to the thornier issue of whether plaintiff's messages and comments/wall postings maintained on these Web sites were maintained in “electronic storage” such that the ECS providers would be prohibited from divulging their content.

As noted, such a finding requires that the messages must be either “in-transmission” or stored for purposes of backup protection. The court determined that messages that had not yet been opened were in a temporary, in-transmission stage. As such, they fell within the definition of “electronic storage” and fell within the ambit of the SCA's protections.

As for messages that have been opened and retained by the user, the court sidestepped the issue of whether their retention met the other definition of “electronic storage,” i.e., maintained for backup protection purposes, and instead held that when providers allow users to retain opened messages, those providers do so not in the capacity of ECS providers, but rather in the capacity of RCS providers. The key is the nature of the service being provided; after the message has been delivered, the service is no longer electronic communication, but rather data storage.

In so holding, the Crispin court followed and expanded other courts' holdings that Internet service and Webmail providers could be ECS providers in connection with the delivery of e-mails, and RCS providers in connection with storage of opened e-mails. As RCS providers with respect to plaintiff's opened messages, Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace were prohibited under the SCA from knowingly divulging the contents of any of these electronic communications. This included e-mails on Media Temple and electronic messages on Facebook and MySpace.

Again, the court drew distinctions between the type of content at issue and applied a different analysis in applying the SCA to comments on MySpace and wall postings on Facebook. The court's analysis here is of particular significance because although previous courts had found bulletin board services to be covered by the SCA, few, if any, had considered the question in detail.

In the context of a comment or wall posting on a social networking site, there is no intermediate in-transmission stage where the posting or comment has yet to be opened, so the court looked to the other “electronic storage” definition in the SCA: whether the data was stored for purposes of backup protection. Citing circuit court precedent that Congress intended to protect private electronic bulletin boards, the court applied a generous definition of the term “backup protection” and found that MySpace comments and Facebook wall postings, once made, are stored for purposes of backup protection, and thus are prohibited from disclosure by ECS providers. Id. at 33 (citing Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines Inc., 302 F.3d 868, 875 (9th Cir. 2002)).

Morrow also found “wall postings” and comments to be protected on alternative grounds. The court held that Facebook and MySpace are RCS providers in connection with wall postings and comments, respectively, analogizing this type of content to YouTube videos that can be posted and marked by the poster as “private.” Both types of content are stored on the service provider's Web site and are private in nature because they are restricted to a limited number of users selected by the poster. As with YouTube, which had previously been found by the Southern District of New York to be an RCS provider with respect to restricted-access postings (see, Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube Inc., 253 F.R.D. 256, 264 (S.D.N.Y. 2008)), Facebook and My-Space were deemed RCS providers for comments and wall postings, respectively.

Ultimately, having found that the SCA applied to Media Temple, Facebook, and MySpace, the Crispin court quashed the subpoenas served on these providers to the extent that they sought to compel disclosure of electronic messages, as well as comments and wall postings that had been marked private by plaintiff and were not accessible to the general public.

Conclusion

One need look no further than the legal acrobatics that the Crispin court and others have employed to determine whether an Internet-based social media provider like Facebook or MySpace is an ECS and/or RCS provider to conclude that the SCA statute is outdated and not ideally structured to address modern electronic communications disclosure and privacy issues.

Indeed, most or all of today's Internet service, social networking, and Webmail providers allow for delivery and receipt of electronic communications and storage thereof, and thus qualify as both ECS and RCS providers, depending on the service that is being employed at a particular time. As demonstrated in Crispin, the distinction can turn on something as seemingly insignificant as whether or not a message has been opened.

While Crispin demonstrates how the SCA may be employed to thwart a subpoena served directly on a social networking or Webmail provider, a litigant seeking to obtain another party's private online communications may be able to avoid application of the SCA altogether by simply serving a Rule 34 document request directly on the party whose communications are sought.

Assuming the service agreement that the user has with the provider contemplates the user's access to stored messages (as most do), the user/litigant may be obligated to collect and preserve relevant messages as part of his or her litigation hold efforts, and ultimately produce them in response to discovery demands. Indeed, this was the holding of one district court faced with the issue of a motion to quash a subpoena for text messages to an adversary's internet service provider.

In that case, Flagg v. City of Detroit, 252 F.R.D. 346 (E.D. Mich., 2008), the court held that text messages stored by defendant's Internet service provider were within defendant's control because defendant had a “legal right to obtain” them. A similar holding was reached in Infinite Energy Inc. v. Thai Heng Chang, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 88084, 2008 WL 4098329 (N.D. Fla., 2008), where the defendant was ordered under threat of sanctions to make all possible efforts to obtain deleted e-mails from its Yahoo! e-mail account.

While litigants may be able to avoid application of the SCA under some circumstances, courts will continue to struggle with application of the statute to modern forms of electronic communication, such as social networking Web sites. As observed by the Ninth Circuit: “[U]ntil Congress brings the laws in line with modern technology, protection of the Internet and [Web] sites such as [these] will remain a confusing and uncertain area of the law.” Konop, 302 F.3d 868, 874.

By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent. ' Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, at age 19

Some six years and 500 million users later, the Facebook experiment has become a model of modern global communication and information sharing. His best intentions aside, however, the transparency Zuckerberg envisioned still meets the occasional roadblock, including from legislation that could not have fully contemplated the scope of the social media explosion of the 21st Century.

In 1986, Congress passed the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”), as part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”), to address privacy issues attendant to the advent of the Internet. Through the SCA, Congress intended to restrict disclosure of private communications by providers of electronic communications services.

However, when Congress passed the SCA, the Internet was in its infancy. The few networks available to consumers, such as Prodigy and America Online, were self-contained, and most people had never heard of the term e-mail, let alone utilized the limited form of electronic messaging that existed at the time. The World Wide Web did not yet exist, and it would be nearly a decade before the introduction of the Web browser in the mid-1990s.

The two students who would later attend Stanford and embark on a research project that would eventually morph into the now ubiquitous Google were just entering their teenage years, and social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, were the stuff of imagination.

Despite huge technological advancements in the 25 years since passage of the SCA, and the ever-increasing prominence of electronic communication in our society, Congress has not amended the SCA to keep pace with changing technology. Rather, courts have had to lead the charge in applying the decades-old statute to modern Internet technology and electronic communication disclosure issues.

Recently, in Crispin v. Christian Audigier Inc., et al., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52832, 2010 WL 2293238 (C.D. Cal., May 26, 2010), the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California was tasked with application of the SCA in the context of social networking and Webmail services. Crispin involved subpoenas issued by defendants in a copyright infringement and breach of contract action to two non-party social networking service providers, Facebook and MySpace, and Media Temple, a non-party Web hosting company that provides Webmail services.

The subpoenas sought disclosure of plaintiff's private e-mail and social networking messages, as well as plaintiff's MySpace comments and Facebook wall postings. Plaintiff moved to quash the subpoenas, arguing that the communications were protected under the SCA.

In the resulting decision, District Court Judge Margaret M. Morrow thoroughly analyzed several important and timely issues, including:

• Whether a litigant has standing to move to quash subpoenas served on non-party Web hosting and social networking companies to which the litigant subscribes;
• Whether the SCA applies to these types of providers;
• Whether the SCA provides immunity for disclosure of private information when compelled by subpoena; and
• The extent to which private electronic communications and data in the custody of social networking and Webmail providers are protected.

As Webmail and social networking Web sites become more prominent in our society, it is increasingly important to fully understand these issues.

Stored Communications Act Coverage

Generally, the SCA targets two types of service providers in its attempt to protect private communications from disclosure:

1. Those that provide subscribers the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications, or “electronic communication service [ECS]” providers; and
2. Those that provide computer storage or processing services by means of an electronic communications system, or “remote computing service [RCS]” providers.

18 U.S.C. ”2510(14), (15).

The type of data to which the SCA applies depends on which type of provider is at issue. ECS providers are prohibited from knowingly divulging the contents of a communication while in “electronic storage” by that service, which includes those messages that are temporarily stored pending transmission (“in-transmission” messages), and any communications stored for purposes of backup protection.

RCS providers are prohibited from divulging the content of any electronic communication carried or maintained on its service solely for the purpose of providing storage or computer processing services, if the provider is not authorized to access the communication for other purposes. Id., ”2702(a)(1), (2).

Thus, the SCA's application to Webmail and social networking service providers such as Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace turns on whether those providers qualify as ECS or RCS providers (or, as discussed below, both).

Who Has Standing to Move to Quash?

The Crispin court first tackled the preliminary issues of standing of a social network account holder to move to quash a subpoena served on a non-party Web hosting or social networking company, and immunity from statutory disclosure restrictions when compelled by subpoena.

Regarding standing, the court found that an individual has a personal right in information in his or her profile and Inbox on a social networking site and his or her Webmail Inbox “in the same way that an individual has a personal right in employment and bank records.”

As with these other traditionally “private” records, this personal right confers standing to move to quash a subpoena seeking such information. See, Crispin at 10-11. Although a provision of the SCA provides immunity for disclosure of information compelled by subpoena, the court found that the statutory exception applied only to compliance with subpoenas issued by a governmental entity in a criminal context. The statute makes no mention of service of a civil subpoena, and the court refused to extend the exception to civil cases.

Defining Provider Status

The court next examined issues surrounding application of the SCA to Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace.

Media Temple was found to qualify as an ECS provider because it provides Webmail, a service that users can access remotely to send and receive e-mail messages. Similarly, Facebook and MySpace provide private messaging services, and thus also qualify as ECS providers.

In so finding, the court followed the “voluminous” case law precedent that establishes providers of electronic messaging services as ECS providers, but the court went further and also found Facebook and MySpace to be ECS providers in connection with Facebook's “wall posting” and MySpace's “comment posting” services. The court likened these to so-called bulletin board services, the providers of which have long been held to be ECS providers as long as the postings are restricted in some fashion and not completely public.

Since Facebook and MySpace allow users to post comments and information and to restrict access to those postings to only selected users, they qualified as ECS providers in connection with this type of service.

The Nature of the Service Provided

Having determined that Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace are subject to the SCA, the court turned to the thornier issue of whether plaintiff's messages and comments/wall postings maintained on these Web sites were maintained in “electronic storage” such that the ECS providers would be prohibited from divulging their content.

As noted, such a finding requires that the messages must be either “in-transmission” or stored for purposes of backup protection. The court determined that messages that had not yet been opened were in a temporary, in-transmission stage. As such, they fell within the definition of “electronic storage” and fell within the ambit of the SCA's protections.

As for messages that have been opened and retained by the user, the court sidestepped the issue of whether their retention met the other definition of “electronic storage,” i.e., maintained for backup protection purposes, and instead held that when providers allow users to retain opened messages, those providers do so not in the capacity of ECS providers, but rather in the capacity of RCS providers. The key is the nature of the service being provided; after the message has been delivered, the service is no longer electronic communication, but rather data storage.

In so holding, the Crispin court followed and expanded other courts' holdings that Internet service and Webmail providers could be ECS providers in connection with the delivery of e-mails, and RCS providers in connection with storage of opened e-mails. As RCS providers with respect to plaintiff's opened messages, Media Temple, Facebook and MySpace were prohibited under the SCA from knowingly divulging the contents of any of these electronic communications. This included e-mails on Media Temple and electronic messages on Facebook and MySpace.

Again, the court drew distinctions between the type of content at issue and applied a different analysis in applying the SCA to comments on MySpace and wall postings on Facebook. The court's analysis here is of particular significance because although previous courts had found bulletin board services to be covered by the SCA, few, if any, had considered the question in detail.

In the context of a comment or wall posting on a social networking site, there is no intermediate in-transmission stage where the posting or comment has yet to be opened, so the court looked to the other “electronic storage” definition in the SCA: whether the data was stored for purposes of backup protection. Citing circuit court precedent that Congress intended to protect private electronic bulletin boards, the court applied a generous definition of the term “backup protection” and found that MySpace comments and Facebook wall postings, once made, are stored for purposes of backup protection, and thus are prohibited from disclosure by ECS providers. Id . at 33 (citing Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines Inc. , 302 F.3d 868, 875 (9th Cir. 2002)).

Morrow also found “wall postings” and comments to be protected on alternative grounds. The court held that Facebook and MySpace are RCS providers in connection with wall postings and comments, respectively, analogizing this type of content to YouTube videos that can be posted and marked by the poster as “private.” Both types of content are stored on the service provider's Web site and are private in nature because they are restricted to a limited number of users selected by the poster. As with YouTube, which had previously been found by the Southern District of New York to be an RCS provider with respect to restricted-access postings ( see , Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube Inc. , 253 F.R.D. 256, 264 (S.D.N.Y. 2008)), Facebook and My-Space were deemed RCS providers for comments and wall postings, respectively.

Ultimately, having found that the SCA applied to Media Temple, Facebook, and MySpace, the Crispin court quashed the subpoenas served on these providers to the extent that they sought to compel disclosure of electronic messages, as well as comments and wall postings that had been marked private by plaintiff and were not accessible to the general public.

Conclusion

One need look no further than the legal acrobatics that the Crispin court and others have employed to determine whether an Internet-based social media provider like Facebook or MySpace is an ECS and/or RCS provider to conclude that the SCA statute is outdated and not ideally structured to address modern electronic communications disclosure and privacy issues.

Indeed, most or all of today's Internet service, social networking, and Webmail providers allow for delivery and receipt of electronic communications and storage thereof, and thus qualify as both ECS and RCS providers, depending on the service that is being employed at a particular time. As demonstrated in Crispin, the distinction can turn on something as seemingly insignificant as whether or not a message has been opened.

While Crispin demonstrates how the SCA may be employed to thwart a subpoena served directly on a social networking or Webmail provider, a litigant seeking to obtain another party's private online communications may be able to avoid application of the SCA altogether by simply serving a Rule 34 document request directly on the party whose communications are sought.

Assuming the service agreement that the user has with the provider contemplates the user's access to stored messages (as most do), the user/litigant may be obligated to collect and preserve relevant messages as part of his or her litigation hold efforts, and ultimately produce them in response to discovery demands. Indeed, this was the holding of one district court faced with the issue of a motion to quash a subpoena for text messages to an adversary's internet service provider.

In that case, Flagg v. City of Detroit , 252 F.R.D. 346 (E.D. Mich., 2008), the court held that text messages stored by defendant's Internet service provider were within defendant's control because defendant had a “legal right to obtain” them. A similar holding was reached in Infinite Energy Inc. v. Thai Heng Chang, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 88084, 2008 WL 4098329 (N.D. Fla., 2008), where the defendant was ordered under threat of sanctions to make all possible efforts to obtain deleted e-mails from its Yahoo! e-mail account.

While litigants may be able to avoid application of the SCA under some circumstances, courts will continue to struggle with application of the statute to modern forms of electronic communication, such as social networking Web sites. As observed by the Ninth Circuit: “[U]ntil Congress brings the laws in line with modern technology, protection of the Internet and [Web] sites such as [these] will remain a confusing and uncertain area of the law.” Konop, 302 F.3d 868, 874.