Facebook Private Info Increasingly Used In Court

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 2, 2011 @03:44AM from the poking-for-fun-and-profit dept.

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."

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It is called discovery and subpoena. by davev2.0 · 2011-02-02 03:58 · Score: 4, Informative

When one is involved in a court case, there is discovery where each party is allowed to investigate and examine the other party, including the other party's private documents such as diaries, for evidence. The court can issue a subpoena for said private documents. Facebook and other social networking sites fall under "private documents".

I have no idea why everyone is surprised at this. It has been like this literally for centuries.