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Judge Makes Divorcing Couple Swap Facebook Passwords
PolygamousRanchKid writes with news of a recent court order during divorce proceedings: both parties must give their social networking passwords to the other, so that each side can snoop for evidence. From the article:
"Everyone knows that evidence from social networking sites comes in handy for lawsuits and divorces. Attorneys usually get that material by visiting someone’s page or asking that they turn over evidence from their page, not by signing into their accounts. But judges are sometimes forcing litigants to hand over the passwords to their Facebook accounts. Should they be? What was the reason behind the court-authorized hacking in the Gallion case? ... While all may be ‘fair’ in love and war (and personal injuries), password exchanges like this are not kosher according to Facebook’s terms of service. I wonder if Judge Shluger is aware that his order violates Facebook’s TOS, which require that users not hand over their passwords to anyone else. Shluger did, at least, try to limit the privacy invasiveness of his order by telling the parties not to prank each other. 'Neither party shall visit the website of the other’s social network and post messages purporting to be the other,' he included in the order."
In my opinion anytime someone enters into contested divorces they should be assigned a guardian by the court with full power of attorney and the ability to have the person they represent temporarily institutionalized until the divorce is finalized. People who get divorced and have any sort of adversarial proceedings typically turn into raving lunatics who are dangers to society.
Since one party just has to inform Facebook to (probably) get both accounts shut down, locking away any 'evidence', as long as it's done quick enough.
Why not also require them to make copies of their house keys for each other so they and their lawyers can go into each other's houses any time they want and rummage through each other's files, look for evidence of affairs in their bedrooms, look for property not reported in the divorce proceedings, look for signs of alcohol or drugs or depression or other personal factors that might have some bearing on the case?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
oh, I don't know. Perhaps because each of the parties agreed to a contract with Facebook, and he's ordering them to break that contract - when Facebook isn't even a party to the case.
In this case it's no big deal at all. But a judicial order that involves deliberately breaking two contracts that were agreed with an uninvolved third party is not exactly what you'd expect to see. Maybe that's normal in divorce courts, no experience there.
The judge might not care that it's Facebook's TOS, he should care however, that he's asking for the worse possible way to get what he wants.
Having the court order facebook to give both parties the information for both accounts is the right, "least abusable" way to go about this.
Ordering people to give over a password to someone they despise, when the only POINT of the password is that it's not known to anyone else is ludicrous.
Thinking that the only damage they can do is limited to the pranks he ordered them not to do is criminally misinformed.
The law in many countries state "ignorance of the law is no defense".
It should have a matching "no judge may be ignorant of the nature of the things he orders about.