A judge of the Supreme Court of New York State has recently held that information voluntarily placed on Facebook and MySpace pages are discoverable, and that doing so would not violate the plaintiff's right to privacy.
The plaintiff, Romano, claimed that she sustained permanent injuries as a result of an accident and also that she could no longer participate in certain activities and her enjoyment of life was affected. As part of its defense, the defendant brought a motion to obtain complete access to the plaintiff's current and historical Facebook and MySpace pages and accounts on grounds that the plaintiff has uploaded certain information that would be inconsistent with her claims concerning the extent and nature of her injuries.
The majority of Romano's Facebook and MySpace profiles have
been marked private by Romano using the websites' privacy
settings, and the content is not accessible to the defendant.
The court allowed access to the information. It reasoned that
precluding the defendant from accessing the plaintiff's profile
would essentially be condoning her attempt to hide relevant
information behind the self regulated privacy controls provided by
Facebook and MySpace. The court further held that it was reasonable
to infer from the limited postings of the plaintiff's public
Facebook and My Space profile pages that her private pages may
contain materials and information that may lead to the disclosure
of admissible evidence.
Since Facebook and MySpace have explicit policies indicating that there is no guarantee of complete privacy, when the plaintiff created her Facebook and MySpace accounts, she consented to the fact that her personal information would be shared with other, notwithstanding her privacy settings, as this is the purpose of these social networks. Since the plaintiff knew that her information may become publicly available, she cannot now claim that she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
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