jason

Slashdot | Court Demands Private Facebook Data

a Canadian court decision that has ordered a man suing over injuries from a car accident to answer questions about content on his private “friends only” Facebook page.
“Lawyers for Janice Roman, the defendant in the lawsuit, believe information posted on John Leduc’s private Facebook site — normally accessible only to his approved ‘friends’ — may be relevant to his claim an accident in Lindsay in 2004 lessened his enjoyment of life. As a result of the ruling by Justice David Brown of Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, Leduc must now submit to cross-examination by Roman’s lawyers about what his Facebook page contains. Brown’s Feb. 20 ruling also makes clear that lawyers must now explain to their clients ‘in appropriate cases’ that postings on Facebook or other networking sites — such as MySpace, LinkedIn and even blogs — may be relevant to allegations in a lawsuit, said Tariq Remtulla, a Toronto lawyer….

Here’s the full article.

I thought I posed about something like this last week. Will it never end? What happens online doesn’t stay where you put it. Don’t worry. I’m not squeaky clean… but I can say that we didn’t know that our past was being recorded forever… and luckily I haven’t done anything that foolish. If you’ve got info on the internet that you don’t want your: partner, grandparents, children or present and future employers… panic. Why not. Panic is a good motivator to get you to do things. You want to live the wild life online, fine. Invent a secondary persona as a creative experiment and create online fictions of social interactions that are really your creative expression of talking about what you’d not really ever do or want to do, as cathartic narrative construction. Not as documents of reality.