Facebook Private Info Increasingly Used In Court 270
Orome1 writes "Making the content of your Facebook account private can thwart the social network's plan to share as much information as possible with advertisers, but may not keep out lawyers looking for material that will contradict your statements in a court of law. US lawyers have been trying to gain permission to access the private parts of social network accounts for a while now, but it seems that only lately they have begun to be successful in their attempts. And this turn of events is another perfectly good reason to think twice about what you post online."
Only lately have they been successful? Uh, no (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook has always honored valid subpoenas, and lawyers have always been able to get them for this kind of info.
It's more that only now have lawyers started to catch up to the idea that it's a good source of info.
Look at the history of presentations at lawyer conferences, and you will see in the past year or so talks on what info you can gain from social network accounts, and e-discovery type stuff have started happening more and more.
So basically, it was just because lawyers are generally close to grandparents when it comes to the technology knowledge curve
facebook is a liar's worst enemy (Score:4, Interesting)
My mom is a family law attorney and uses facebook to consistently tear down
the defenses of liars on the witness stand.