Digital fingerprints

Ethan Zuckerman asks whether social media giants should ever hand over user information to law enforcement (“Could a private message get you sent to prison?”, October). It is something of a mystery to me why anyone should think that recording plans to commit a crime, or recording having committed a crime, should be excluded from the matrix of evidence in a possible prosecution. One may disagree strongly with the classification of some activities as crimes, but that is a different argument.

As my late father observed, one should never record anything that they might be embarrassed to have read out in open court a few years later.

Simon Cockshutt, via the website