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Girl's Facebook Post Costs Her Dad $80,000
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "BBC reports that when Dana Snay learned her father had been awarded an $80,000 cash settlement in an age-discrimination lawsuit against his former employer, she couldn't resist bragging about it on Facebook. 'Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver,' the teen posted to her 1,200 Facebook friends. 'Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.' Trouble was her father had signed a confidentiality agreement so the school refused to pay a dime and a Florida appeals court has found in the school's favor. 'Snay violated the agreement by doing exactly what he had promised not to do,' wrote Judge Linda Ann Wells. 'His daughter then did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent.' Snay's father said in depositions that he and his wife knew they had to say something to their daughter because she suffered 'psychological scars' from issues during her enrollment at the school and was aware that they were in mediation with Gulliver attorneys. Attorneys say it's unlikely confiding in Dana Snay would have jeopardized the settlement — it was the facebook post that did them in. 'Remember when all you had to worry about was your daughter posting naked selfies of herself on Facebook?' writes Elie Mystal at Above the Law. 'Now, things are worse.'"
As near as I can tell, there's nothing especially tech related in this story. She screwed up in a way that many before her have screwed up, it's just that she happened to use facebook to do it. Nothing to see here.
Not news at all. However the penalty for this stupid thing is a bit harsh compared to the infraction. Maybe the parents should have explained a bit more to her what this entails and what the effects of telling anybody could be...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is only one way to keep something secret; don't tell anyone. And anyone includes your teenage daughter.
Confidentiality agreements are *gasp* legal contracts. Their daughter made a stupid mistake, as teenagers do, that doesn't change the fact that the agreement was broken.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
This is why it's important to communicate with your kid. These things are not difficult to foresee. Kids (and a lot of adults) tend to believe against all reason that Facebook and it's ilk are their own private playground where nothing goes past their own circle of friends. But Facebook is just the tool here -- an attractive nuisance, if you will. It's so easy to acquire the momentary satisfaction of revealing information to your circle of friends. But it's really part of a larger problem, that of knowing when to keep your mouth shut in any medium. Adults presume at their peril that kids have this kind of insight.
So if, in this case, the adult told the kid "this is what a confidentiality agreement means, and doing this or that will violate it" and the kid did it anyway, she now owes the family about a century of allowance. But if the adult did not adequately explain this, it's really the adult's fault, because this is a natural thing for kids to want to do.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Gulliver Preparatory School wins. They don't have to pay anything...but then again, they don't have any right to suppress the truth which a court of law has declared (now that the judgement is apparently void), that they're (in my opinion) just one big waste of air space and semi-human skin wrapped in a warm moist layer of fecal matter. Spread the word! Gulliver Preparatory School is the sort of learning establishment that seemingly fires all their most experienced personnel when their age becomes worrisome - why would you want a bunch of ignorant young trolls educating your kids?
The biggest screwup here is that the father has admitted to breaking the contract by saying "we needed to tell her something", when all he needed to do was say nothing and get the schools lawyers to prove that he told his daughter about the settlement; instead of her daughter finding out by eavesdropping on a conversation, reading a letter or bank statement.
But yes, it's more of a law story than a tech story, but I can see the Your Rights Online angle. Just.
...Eric Schmidt told us there should be no reason to have any secrets.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I wonder if this move, and the ensuing bad publicity, will ultimately cause more than $80,000 of damages.
Since he violated the settlement agreement, the school may be free to sue him for the damages.
The daughter may have flipped their fate from "extra vacation"; to, "being forced to give up their house", to cover the legal costs from the school's successful lawsuit against them over breach of contract.
She didn't, so he violated the agreement the second he told his daughter. Which, when dealing with a normal adult - you say "we won, we got our judgement, and we agreed that we would not talk about it, so we'll use the money to find a job and life goes on." And a normal adult would celebrate in private and never say anything unless asked, or would be cagey about the results (they came to an agreement, and my dad is looking for another position). No harm, no foul - it's like doing 68 in a 65mph zone.
But this adult, his (presumably 18 year old) daughter, decided to crow about it and make a stink in the very community the school wanted to avoid the publicity. So it's his fault for telling her, but her fault for basically ratting him out.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
IANAL so maybe I'm missing something.
Yes. The law part. Are you really saying 'Because they settled they must've been in the wrong so it's OK to break the agreement they settled on'? Do you realise how even more fucked up the world would be if everyone operated like that?
I'm sure of it. I, like most people, had never heard of Gulliver Preparatory School before this fiasco. Now their name is all over the news (as are their age discrimination issues), solely because they rescinded the settlement - the fact that the girl blabbed on Facebook was inconsequential since no one outside her circle of friends knew or cared about the issue. The school had every right to take the money back, and I don't fault them for that, but I don't think they thought their cunning plan all the way through first.
No. You aren't thinking about this at all. It has nothing to do with what the daughter agreed to. The Father agreed to tell nobody, then violated that agreement by telling the daughter, which would have been a violation that never came to light if the daughter didn't subsequently blab to the world about it. You see, the violation was the father telling the daughter, not the daughter telling the world. It was the fact that the daughter told the world that made it obvious that the father told the daughter.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Since the original agreement was not to sue and not to say something, and that got broken, nothing to keep him from taking them to court and suing over the original thing. Might even work to their favor. "Well your honor, they were going to pay us off, but then didn't when word of it got leaked out via facebook."
As for the daughter, she's 19, time for her to leave the nest and earn her own living.
Be seeing you...
The school effectively paid $80k for confidentiality; a non-disclosure agreement, and a breach would still pay pay $1.
There usually needs to be consideration (money) for a deal to be a deal. Unless you are getting steam-rolled.
The settlement was two parts.
The first was acknowledgment of any claims or allegations (not agreement or objection), and there could be no further claims by either the parents or child (even when she becomes an adult), or other family members, ever; pertaining to those (generally defined but bound by a date range) allegations.
The second part was a conditional consideration (payment). This non-disclosure agreement would also have a time restriction of a reasonable time, probably a decade or less. This probably was setup as a payment schedule, though not required. The schedule continues the evaluation of the non-disclosure - and reminds them not to do what the child did.
No matter what, both parts are executed upon signature, and the conditional payment would be evaluated for a period of time before payout.
Once you give someone $80k and they spend it, not many people can come up with that amount of money, so there is always a waiting period.
Please don't read his journal before replying to him. After all, he can't force you to and he's not holding a gun to your head.
Agreed. Once the public sword has been unsheathed, the public have an interest in knowing how their sword was used -- knowing the settlement. All settlements for suits filed. The Courts are corruptly reducing their workload by enforcing confidentiality terms.
You're kidding me, right? Of course I didn't. Did you forget where you are?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Your facts seem to be less than accurate. For example, in the UK, the minimum wage for 16-17 year olds was set in 2004 and started increasing in 2006. Mysteriously, the unemployment rate for 16-17 year olds in the UK started heading up right at the same time until it almost doubled. Probably just a coincidence, right?
Increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment among those who are less valuable to an employer than the minimum wage. They work the same way as every other law setting a price floor. Price floors doesn't exactly have controversial effects.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.