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."

Comments

Terms of Service

[CmdrPony]

I wonder if Judge Shluger is aware that his order violates Facebook’s TOS

Why the hell would he care?

Re:Terms of Service

[broken_chaos]

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.

Re:Terms of Service

[perlchild]

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.

divorce

[nomadic]

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.

Re:divorce

[jpapon]

Spoilation of evidence? Is that when you give away the ending of a cop drama?

Spoilation alert!

Re:divorce

[rtaylor]

You need to delete the account before being required to turn over the account.

Even better if you do it before the divorce is filed.

Passwords, keys

[Phat_Tony]

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?

Re:Passwords, keys

[Wrath0fb0b]

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?

They can. It's called discovery, and it's one of the most useful tools for civil litigants because it forces the adversary to disclose (or assert under legal penalty that it doesn't exist) any documents relevant to a particular trial. So if you sue some corporation for selling you a defective widget, you can force them to turn over all emails and notes about quality-testing or safety testing for that widget. Without it, you'd have absolutely no way to prove (e.g.) that Sally in engineering sent an email to her boss explaining that the flux capacitor supplier they chose was cutting corners and that it could cause device failure and you could basically never make a case for knowing indifference. Or if you are suing that corporation for violating the GPL and you have reason (binary similarity) to believe that product X contains GPL code, you can demand they turn over that source code for inspection. Again, without it, you would never be able to prove a GPL violation because that source code would be locked inside some secure internal server and you would be forced to make some equivocal claim about the binaries instead of looking at the plain evidence.

A divorce case is (in the eyes of the law, which has this odd thing about procedure being uniform) no different -- each party is entitled to any document or file, electronic or paper, that's relevant to the divorce. That includes anything inside your house, anything in your bedroom, unreported property*, hospitalization records. If it has a bearing on the case, the parties are absolutely entitled to it (under restrictions mind you, public disclosure of any information derived from discovery subjects you to criminal and civil sanctions plus is a great way to get the judge ticked off at you).

* I used to work the tech side of things for an investigation firm involved in the child-support end of divorces (long after the litigation ended) looking for evidence that parties exaggerated or even fabricated their claims of poverty when accused of nonpayment or underpayment. Some of these guys would come in to court pleading that they had no disposable income only to find our pictures of them at strip joints getting lap dances. Concealing assets and income from the court can land you in jail for contempt. Don't do it.

Re:If evidence is found by swapping passwords...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty easily, actually. People actually believe their "private" messages are private. Plus, friending someone on Facebook is something you do even before trading phone numbers these days, so you're going to get their real account if you meet them in real life in any sort of work/school related capacity.

When I was in college (only a couple of years ago), I met a girl a couple of years younger who was in a history class I was taking to fill up some requirements. She had a fiance, but he didn't pay her enough attention and bored her, so she was looking for action on the side. Some of the steamiest messages I've ever seen on a computer screen, all via her real Facebook account. She married the guy later and still has the account. The messages are at least still in my inbox on Facebook, so I assume they're still in hers too.

Re:One question

[larry bagina]

Think again