The French government has come up with an innovative way of financing a program of mass social media, surveillance, to use it to detect tax fraud. The self financing surveillance scheme has now been given the go the constitutional court. Customs and
tax officials will be allowed to review users' profiles, posts and pictures for evidence of undisclosed income. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that users' privacy and freedom of expression could be compromised, but its applied caveats to
the legislation. It said authorities would have to ensure that password-protected content was off limits and that they would only be able to use public information pertaining to the person divulging it online. However the wording suggests that the non
public data is available and can be used for other more covert reasons. The mass collection of data is part of a three-year online monitoring experiment by the French government and greatly increases the state's online surveillance powers.
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