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Quartz: The US government has mounting evidence that Elon Musk violated Twitter’s data privacy agreement
September 14, 2023
The Justice Department filing claims that Twitter was in “privacy compliance chaos” after Musk took over, according to John Davisson, director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “Responsible officials exited the company, security controls were abandoned, products were introduced or radically altered with no attention paid to user privacy,” Davisson said. “Musk’s erratic decision-making repeatedly put the privacy of users at risk and clearly violated the 2022 consent decree.”
If the government finds that Twitter violated the consent decree, it has a few options, Davisson and McGee told Quartz. It can negotiate a third consent decree and levy an even bigger civil penalty than the $150 million Twitter agreed to pay in 2022, it can sue Twitter and hash it out in court if the company won’t agree to settle, it could impose an independent monitor to oversee Twitter’s compliance, or it could limit the ways Twitter makes money off of user data.
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