Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Before, we had to hire a private investigator to get information on people. Now they put
it out for themselves for everyone to see on Facebook and these other and Twitter and
other social networking sites. People seem to lose their common sense when they get on
the internet and forget that this is available for everyone to see.
Peter how does this coming up in divorce cases? Well, we definitely council our clients and
in our initial letter to them and our consultation. Please make your Facebook page private. Please
password protect your email with a password that your spouse can't determine. Please be
careful what you say in public over the internet, through your emails because that could be
used as evidence against you in your case, very damaging evidence. And realize that some
of the items may be up from your college days where you were at a party and you did things
you wouldn't want people to see. That is going to be exhibit "A" in your custody case, in
your divorce case. And people have become attune to this because
there are so many examples in divorce cases where social networking posts have come up
and back to haunt them and they have made it private and have even taken the page down.
What people don't realize is that it goes beyond that. This is a social network. So
maybe it's the new boyfriend or new girlfriends site that has the information on their about
the trip that the spouse and this new paramour just took. Pictures of them with the kids.
Maybe that boyfriend is making posts about the divorce case. There's all kinds of stuff
that can be learned now from this whole circle of friends that the party has too, and that
needs to be controlled but it's very difficult to do that because the party doesn't necessarily
have control of what their friends say. There are also issues that if you take down
every site or you delete every page, whether you have destroyed evidence in the case. That's
called spoliation of evidence and there could be damages for that. So how you handle these
things, it's critical to talk to your lawyer about how to protect yourself from this damaging
evidence and the destruction of perhaps damaging evidence.
There are ways of getting information that has been taken down. Facebook, we can't subpoena
Facebook for information. There is a Federal law that prohibits that. But what Facebook
will do is restore all the posts that have been on that persons site and that person
then can be court ordered to download that information and produce it. So this is extremely
powerful evidence that can be obtained if you know what you are looking for.
We also know people using email, Facebook, social media to create false evidence to frame
the other side so we have to be aware of that and know how to handle that kind of damaging
evidence that was in fact created for the purpose of litigation by the other party.
We have seen allot of espionage and spying between spouses. This is a personal relationship,
they know each other inside and out, they may know their passwords. They know their
weaknesses. We see people putting GSP tracking devices on cars and following them. We've
seen them hacking into their computers. Secretly tape recording them. Mayn of these
things could be crimminal acts giving rise to tremendous penalties.