The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.
The proposal issued Aug. 21 calls for a contractor to "crawl and archive" social-networking Web sites where the White House maintains an official presence on seven networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Slideshare.
The collection will include the comments, tags, graphics, audio and video posted by users who don't work for the White House.
The White House has more than 333,000 fans on Facebook, and posts updates several times a day that draw hundreds of thousands of comments, both positive and negative. The White House has more than 1 million followers on Twitter and more than 87,000 subscribers on YouTube, where more than 400 videos of the president and White House briefings are posted.
