Having a tweet of mine cited by a CBC story confirmed the importance of attention to precision on Twitter. With Twitter, you only get 140 characters to express a thought, so you need to be succinct. [see Mark Evans’ post on this yesterday]
When I broke the story on Friday about the Office of the Privacy Commissioner releasing its findings about Bell’s use of deep packet inspection, I wrote 4 tweets about various aspects of the report, including one that said:
Office of Privacy Commission (OPC) approves Bell’s use of DPI: http://tinyurl.com/kr9o7k
CBC’s story credits me with breaking the story, listing my tweet right above a couple paragraphs that go on to say:
A spokesperson for the commissioner, however, said the office was certainly not approving DPI.
“It would not be accurate to suggest, in reading the finding, that we are endorsing DPI,” she said.
The juxtaposing might lead some to think that OPC was contradicting me. Of course, I didn’t tweet that the OPC approves DPI. I said that the OPC approved Bell’s use of DPI, and then provided the link to the full story on my blog.
And, as the CBC wrote:
Bell has stated that the DPI platform it uses has this capability, but that it is currently not using it for this purpose. It has also assured this office that any added purpose for which it currently uses PI would respect the company’s privacy obligations… its own privacy policies an applicable customer agreements.
The process for the privacy commission’s review was started by a CIPPIC letter in May 2008 that, at the time, CBC quoted as stating:
Practices [such as] those involving the collection and use of personal information are not necessary to ensure network integrity and quality of service.
Moreover, subscribers whose traffic is being inspected have not consented to the inspection and use of their data for this purpose.
The OPC disagreed and said these complaints were not well founded.
Precision is important.
True, but the title of said blog post was: "DPI doesn't invade privacy". The OPC report expressly raised that concern, that DPI could indeed invade privacy.
It may have been more precise to title the post something like: "PrivCom finds no evidence that Bell's DPI invades privacy", or words to that effect.
Hi Actinolite – thanks for the comment.
I consider blogs very different from Twitter. When you read a blog post, you get all the details – and I even gave a link to the full report. The rules for headlines are very different.
It got you to read the post and even engaged you enough to post a comment!
I appreciated that you updated the post to include the OPC decision, so I could come to my own conclusions. I just wish the MSM would some around to this idea, as it is much more transparent.
And yes, I'll certainly admit it was attention-grabbing… 🙂