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."
If it's germain, why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Subpoenas for all sorts of physical records and correspondence are par for the course. How is this any different than a subpoena for your diary or letters?
Re:Why shouldn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The crap people say about themselves online is ridiculous.
People without sense to moderate themselves will no doubt end up paying for it one way or the other. Talk about your hard partying lifestyle all the time and get a divorce, or charged with drunk driving, or dismissed from a job... good luck keeping that to yourself at that point
Hell yeah. Fuck those party people. How dare they live a life that is not perfectly whitewashed and 100% compatible with a Puritannical lifestyle. They deserve to suffer for that! They deserve to suffer even when they acted like responsible adults and only had their fun when they knew it would not interfere with any of their obligations or responsibilities. The nerve of those people, doing things with their own lives that maybe I wouldn't do with my own life.
... well, now the vultures swoop down to see if they can find anyone who's out of line. It's the same lovers of gossip who have always existed, just on a newer medium. Like that Sublime lyric, "insufferable informer crazy fools, wait with their fingers crossed for you to break the rules."
I've decided that this offends me, and as we all know, that gives me the right to demand that they either change their ways or suffer. After all, the person who takes offense is never the one who needs to change, no, not even when they actively sought out the things which offend them. Having cleared that up... get a divorce you say? Clearly anyone who would ever want privacy from the outside world for any reason didn't deserve to be married. Charged with drunk driving? They obviously had no business having a license in the first place. Dismissed from a job? Well then, no matter the quantity or quality of their work, no matter how professional they were, no matter how well they separated their private life from their work life, they are clearly riff-raff and it's an excellent business decision to get rid of them. Fools.
In fact, I think everyone needs to have their every waking moment scrutinized and archived by strangers. That'll teach them to be perfect and above reproach and nothing could possibly go wrong. Maybe the 1984 style telescreens can be handy for this.
The crap people say about themselves online is not really so different from what they say offline. It's just that when they say such things offline, in person, they usually aren't recording and broadcasting their speech. Now that they are using a medium that both records and makes available
Otherwise people have always been a little deviant. It's just that they used to understand discretion.
Keep it simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get a facebook account. I don't have one and never intend to.
Re:Is it truly so hard? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, these are civil cases, not criminal. There is no prosecutor and there is no guilty/not guilty.
Second, it is the DEFENSE that is using FB as evidence that the plaintiff is lying.
So, let's say I sue you for $10M because I fell on your property, and I claim I am stuck in bed 24x7 and can't enjoy life at all. Are you really going to say that you wouldn't use pictures I posted on Facebook of me dancing at a party as evidence that my life is not as bad as I am claiming?