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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.
Yeah. "We screwed up. We should've known better, but we decided to do it anyway. Here's our penalty money." "Oh, you screwed up. Your daughter didn't play by our rules. We take it all back...for teh win!"
They screwed up by divulging legally privileged information to a child, who has not yet reached the maturity to appropriately respect the confidentiality requirement.
And there's the problem. Confidentiality agreements should be illegal in the context of a legal case. If you don't want people to know you are a scumbag company, don't be a scumbag company. Paying people off to keep the secret seems phenomenally immoral.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Confidentially agreements allow companies to hide patterns of illegal behavior. Repeated bad behavior should result in escalating fines and confidentially agreements just make it that much harder for the next victim to show that there is entrenched culture of abuse.
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
You don't seem to quite understand how the world works. This particular company may not be a scumbag company (though my understanding is that it is in fact one such organization.) This single case is immaterial. The fact is that many, many scumbag companies use the confidentiality "trick" to continue to exibit behaviours that, in many cases, lead to further deaths, disfigurements, etc. So you ask me, what's the alternative? That's easy. Make it illegal to keep secret the details of settlement agreements. Really. Seriously? You couldn't figure that out?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun