I don’t generally get involved with e-discovery issues. Not my area. However, just after my recent post on the total lack of privacy for cell phones and the data they generate which is retained by the cell phone companies, I was a bit shocked to see the New York State court ruling on the lack of privacy for social media sites.
In the early days of e-mail the refrain was that sending confidential information in an email was equivalent to sending it on a post card. It was there for everyone to see and read.
Recently the Supreme Court for Suffolk County in New York ruled that a plaintiff “did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to her Facebook and MySpace pages; notwithstanding certain privacy settings that plaintiff may have used to mark some of the content as private.” The same is not true in all states, but the bottom line here is that something you post on Facebook or MySpace can come back to haunt you when you are job hunting or involved in legal proceedings. Anything you mistakenly think is “private” is not, in fact.
A recent article in Law Technology News indicates that about 40% of admissions officers research candidates using the web or social media, and close to a third found something they consider damaging.