Facebook- A Legal Lie Detector?

According to the Reuters article “In U.S. Courts, Facebook Posts Become Less Private,” courts are now turning to information posted on social networking sites to determine the legitimacy of complaints. The article cites that defense lawyers, particularly those in personal-injury cases, are using social networking sites to show “potentially exculpatory evidence.” For example, in one recent case, a New York woman claimed to be bedridden after falling off a defective chair, only to be shown happily smiling in front of her home in family Facebook photos.

In high school, I volunteered for an organization called Teen Peer Court where I defended juveniles in courts with jury members made up of their peers. In one case, I had just directed the defendant and he had told the court that he had not smoked any marijuana since the incident occurred. To my dismay, the prosecution pulled up his Myspace page and showed the jury a photo of the defendant smoking marijuana. The photo was dated after the defendant’s arrest. This evidence not only proved that the defendant was lying, but also showed that he could not be trusted and had not learned his lesson by being arrested.

Cases such as these bring up privacy issues. Can courts legally bring social networking sites into evidence? Part of the answer lies in the person’s privacy settings. If the person’s social networking page is open to members of the public, that person should expect anyone to be able to access their information. In the case that the person’s page is set to private, the process becomes a little different. Jim Dempsey, vice president of public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology states that, “You do have a right of privacy in your private Facebook postings. But in the context of litigation, that right can be overcome.” Dempsey is referring to court issued subpoenas.

The federal Stored Communications Act regulates how private information can be circulated in non-criminal matters. The law has been interpreted to mean that sites do no have to hand over users’ personal data in response to civil subpoenas. However, defense attorneys are finding ways to work around this. Attorneys are now asking judges to order plaintiffs to sign consent forms granting defendants access to their private information. Defendants are then attaching these consent forms to subpoenas to social networking sites. This essentially authorizes sites to hand over printouts of the private portions of the plaintiff’s social networking pages to defendants. Should these practices be legal?

Hacking Your Personal Information- Easier Than You May Think

According to the New York Times article “New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users,” hacking one’s personal information is easier than one may think. A new, free program called Firesheep now allows people to see what other users of an unsecured Wi-Fi network are doing and then log on as them at the sites they visited. This program grabs Web browser’s cookies, bits of code that identifies your computer, and is able to get your settings and other private information from the site. This allows users to be you on the site and have full access to your account.

The scary thing about this program is that it is so easy to use, and general members of the public are not taking precautions to protect themselves. Firesheep is more popular than people may think, more than a million people have downloaded the program in the past three months. Fortunately, sites that employ the cryptographic protocol Transport Layer Security are safe from the snoopers. PayPal and many banks use this feature, but most other sites that people trust with their information to do use this privacy safeguard. Web sites state that they do no encrypt all of their information because it will slow down the site and carries a large expense.

To protect yourself, change the Service Set Identifier or SSID of your wireless network from the default name to something less predictable. It is also recommended that people not use public Wi-Fi. I think it is important for the public to have knowledge of such programs and to take the proper precautions necessary to avoid identity theft.

Is Your Facebook Clean?

In all of our discussions, I believe that we focused on who should be able to see our information, rather than whether or not we should be held accountable for posting it. Yes, we may want to keep our comments and pictures private, but if they should be made public, are we still responsible for them, despite the fact that they were posted with the expectation of privacy?

I believe that, expectation of privacy or not, a person has still made the information in some way available and should be held accountable. One may be arrested for crimes committed in the privacy of one’s home, and I believe that, similarly, one is responsible for information posted to what many forget is technically a public forum. I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about people’s Facebook pages costing them their jobs, or other such serious consequences. This may be the case for Dr. Joseph Kenan.

Dr. Joseph Kenan is the president of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry. He advises family court cases in custody disputes—or, perhaps, that is what he used to do. “Lewd” photographs of Dr. Kenan were recently discovered on his Facebook page, leading many parents to challenge his ability to determine good and bad child rearing situations. Dr. Kenan claims that the photos and comments were made in jest and in no way reflect his real views or professional abilities.

At least one court commissioner approved his removal from a case, but at least one other said that his Facebook has no bearing on a court case. While we have yet to see how this will ultimately play out, what we can take away from this case is that it is far simpler in the long run to maintain a clean profile. Once content is uploaded, there is no telling who may see it. This is not a privacy issue, it’s a common sense issue.