The idea of social media being private, when much of the point of social media is to tell anyone within earshot certain details about your life, may seem somewhat contradictory, but with the new reports of the government surveillance program known as PRISM emerging, one particular social media company is finding new opportunities to promote its privacy leanings: Twitter (News - Alert).

Reports emerged from both the Guardian and the Washington Post about PRISM, the surveillance program that reportedly involved the NSA going directly into the servers of some companies to get the data it required, and there was an extensive laundry list of companies said to be involved in the PRISM proceedings. Microsoft (News - Alert), for example, had been on the list since 2007, followed closely by Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, with the most recent addition being Apple in October of 2012. But one company that didn't make the list at all was none other than Twitter.

Twitter, despite being only a seven-year-old company, actually has a pretty major record when it comes to keeping its users' information as private as it can be kept. For instance, Twitter is routinely spotted fighting subpoenas for information from the government, and most recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation—an organization whose primary focus is online privacy and the like—recently gave Twitter a six-star rating, something that most other companies couldn't muster. Since the Electronic Frontier Foundation's star rating system is based on clear criteria—like requiring a warrant to get content, telling users about the government's data requests and publishing transparency reports, and fighting for privacy rights both in the court and in Congress—it's clear that the higher the rating, the more it's doing in terms of keeping data private.

Why Twitter wasn't on the list of PRISM organizations, however, is unclear. Twitter wasn't answering questions about the PRISM list posed to it, and when asked, companies like Facebook (News - Alert), Apple,\ and Microsoft that were found on the list denied not only that data was being offered up, but that they had even heard of PRISM in the first place. With Twitter set to launch an IPO in the coming weeks, this new evidence of its privacy commitment may be a big help to the bottom line.

The whole PRISM affair is shaping up to be, potentially, a very large one, impacting the way of life of many regular people on a regular basis. The wider fallout from such an affair will likely take some time to ultimately come to light, but the implications for it certainly aren't good. However, Twitter may well indeed see some of that benefit from being one of the only major social media firms not spotted on that list. As Twitter starts pushing toward IPO status and starts looking harder at profitability, the need to more often accede to government requests for data may weigh a little more heavily on the company.

With PRISM now out of the bag, and public uproar already in progress, just where it all ends up remains to be seen. But people seldom like discovering they're being spied on, so the end result may not be a happy one.