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Facebook, Friend of Divorce Lawyers
crimeandpunishment writes "A lot of Facebook users going through divorces have learned a very costly lesson about their privacy settings. In fact, for many of them their Facebook pages helped lead to the divorce in the first place. More than 80% of the members of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers say they've used or run into evidence gathered from Facebook and other social networking sites over the last five years — and some of them have some very entertaining stories to tell. 'Facebook is the unrivaled leader for turning virtual reality into real-life divorce drama,' said AAML's president."
As always the issue here is not the type of information (data valuable to divorce lawyers) but the context in which it is gathered (Facebook search unbeknownst to the poster). And once again the usual responses will be - a) Poster is stupid, and b) Facebook is evil.
I tend to think that so long as you are empowered to share or not to share then all is well. With Facebook this is not the case. My sister shared a reasonably embarrassing photo of me with some mutual friends (some of which I work with) which was then shared with my whole building by whatever networking effect took over - nice!. I was not in control of this. Now you can argue that she could have done this pre-social networking site era - but she couldn't simple because she is not in physical contact with 99.5% of people in my building. Social networking makes ones dis-empowerment that much more pervasive.