Facebook showing up in Divorce Court

No, not the company, the information. Seems some folks are less than careful with their Information Assurance plan, putting unwarranted confidence in confidentiality and ignoring the problem of non-repudiation*:

Forgot to de-friend your wife on Facebook while posting vacation shots of your mistress? Her divorce lawyer will be thrilled.

Oversharing on social networks has led to an overabundance of evidence in divorce cases. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years.

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Neither Viken, in Rapid City, S.D., nor other divorce attorneys would besmirch the attorney-client privilege by revealing the identities of clients, but they spoke in broad terms about some of the goofs they've encountered:

— Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.

— Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his "write something about yourself" section: "If you have the balls to get in my face, I'll kick your ass into submission."

— Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook's Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.

— Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook.

I'm told that Judges dig it when your testimony is contradicted by your own Facebook (or Myspace, or whatever) page. Look, Facebook has lousy privacy, and an even lousier privacy policy. Assume that anything you post there is seen by everyone on Al Gore's Information Superhighway. Not that you'd ever post anything like that.



* Security Inside Baseball.