Buck passing. IT support people have heard of it
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US lawyers start to mine private Facebook zones
AN OUTCRY is erupting in the US over how judges are giving lawyers rights to plunder private emails and posts in social notworking websites.
Apparently US lawyers want to hunt for anything that might contradict what their opponents are saying in court. While you have to admire them for trying, judges in civil cases are actually letting them do it.
Defense lawyers working for insurance cases are doing well by finding snaps of people claiming to be injured or bedridden turning up quite well in Facebook snaps.
In the past judges have long allowed information gleaned from public portions of social networking sites to be used as evidence. But material that is password-protected or reserved for selected 'friends' has been off limits.
However two state courts have granted defendants broad access to "private" photos and comments. A federal court issued a similar ruling in 2009.
According to Reuters the problem is one of law. Postings on social networks are generally governed by the federal Stored Communications Act, which regulates how private information can be disseminated in non-criminal matters.
So far the law has meant that websites don't have to hand over users' personal data in response to a civil subpoenaes. But lawyers have been asking judges to order plaintiffs to sign consent forms granting defendants access to their private material. They then attach these consent forms when they subpoena the websites.
Effectively the plaintiffs are essentially authorising the sites to hand over printouts of the private portions of their pages to the defendants.
However some of that information is being used by lawyers in somewhat strange ways.
In one case a woman claimed she fell off a defective chair and suffered "serious permanent personal injuries" due to the negligence of the Michigan based furniture company Steelcase.
Steelcase lawyer James Gallagher told a judge that her MySpace postings regularly included smiley faces, suggesting that she was happy. He also snooped into the Facebook page of the woman's daughter, which, he said, included postings and photos indicating that the family had travelled to Florida, contradicting the woman's claims that she was homebound.
This made New York Supreme Court Judge Jeffrey Arlen Spinner grant Gallagher's motion to compel the woman to provide access to the private portions of her Facebook and Myspace pages. µ
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You may be missing a point on the American notice pleading system.
Plaintiff files a complaint alleging certian causes of action and some facts they already know.
If the judge agrees that it stated a claim upon which relief can be granted, the trial will proceed to discovery. Discovery allows the parties to compel relevant information disclosure from their opponents such as: e-mails and facebook activity, in addition to hardcopies of documents.
There is nothing shocking about this, we've been doing it for 200 years.
Since the creation of the internet, it has only taken two brain cells to figure out other people may see what you post.
Has anyone seen that movie called "Echelon Conspiracy"?
In that movie Echelon was trying to move itself out side of the NSA's computer so it could give itself an upgrade that Congress decided against.
Well it looks like it succeeded.. It just renamed itself to Facebook in the process.
I mean seriously what better way to voluntary gather intelligence from around the world from 550 million people.
Why do you think all these large corporations are always pushing for you to store your stuff in the "cloud"? Its called easy access.... If you store it at home under encryption then they have zero access to your data.. If its in the cloud that is a whole another story as a judge has a lot less effort to force a company to decrypt the data stored on their system.
So maybe you will think a little next time you put something on the web.
If things are private and you do not want anyone else to know, don't put it on the web or any of those social network site. Anything you put there is the same as what you would say in public can be used to against you in the court.
So, I never used any of those social dysfunctional sites and never will.
this is further conclusive proof that facebook users are stupid
This is certainly a problem for those trying to sue the deep pocket capitalist pigs. There should be no burden of proof of being injured to claim injury. Just for the companies to cough up the $$$ without needing to provide any evidence.