RebKell's Junkie Boards

[pilight]

...In Violation Of Federal Privacy Law

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/08/the-irs-is-mining-taxpayer-data-on-social-media-in-violation-of-federal-privacy-law.html

[tfan]

Does Federal Privacy Law apply to our spy agencies? They probably have many terabytes of our online data.

[pilight]

[ArtBest23]

There seems to be a giant stretch in the long underlying journal article on which the brief article relies. Because one Federal appeals court several years ago held that a warrant is necessary for the Govt to read private emails, they conclude a warrant is also necessary to review publicly posted social media posts and comments.

I know of no law that prohibits the Govt from reading or mining public social media posts. And I couldn't find any cited in the article.

If there are any, I'd be interested to know about them.

I find it somewhat unlikely that if somebody was publicly posting some tax dodge scheme on Facebook that the IRS wouldn't be allowed to use that as a basis for a tax fraud case. Maybe there's some law that says they can't, but I'd be interested to know about it if there is, and I couldn't find any such thing in the articles.

[Randy]

The article didn't really specify exactly how it is that the IRS could use this info. I suppose that if you posted you were having lunch with a bunch friends, but then deducted as a business meeting that would be an example, but it all just seems very far fetched.

I'm not on faceplant or any of the usual places anyway. I'm much more worried about crooks using such info to learn my dog's name thus compromising all my passwords.

It does make me think perhaps it makes sense to set up a social media account and fill it with misinformation though.

[pilight]

There's something more fundamentally wrong here than privacy or first amendment issues. No one tells the whole or real story on social media, which is the important thing here. Not only is it abusive to citizens to audit them based on their affinity for wearing fake gold chains, taking pictures of their neighbor’s Bugatti and telling Twitter they bought it c4$h, and having less money than they tell their friends, it’s a waste of IRS resources.

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