OT - any Facebook experts out there?

They also subpoena emails from your email provider.

However, most of the time, they will not get them. There has to be some suspicion that a crime was committed for the company to be compelled to hand them over. When you see them used in divorce cases and other civil matter, someone involved in the case has provided them. Like a spiteful ex or a supposed friend.

Okay...... now you have me curious. Are you Marc Zuckerberg????? lol Do you work for Facebook? What's the connection? Your claims are at odds with everything I have been reading in very reputable Law journals and the Wall Street Journal. The source I quoted above was the Judge in the ruling, in his own words. Unless you can offer some compelling evidence to the contrary, I stand by what I reported. So please elaborate... <--- just kiddin' lol ... Holy bejeebers! I just looked you up on your profile! Whereja go? You lost an entire person! Nice work. I see you are a software engineer. My son is an EE for a company that shall remain nameless. He says there is no such thing as privacy anymore.

Good grief... I don't even know how to begin to respond to this... except to say that I feel like I'm in a court of law with opposing counsel trying to trip me up by bombarding me with questions and quick frankly, I don't appreciate it.

I am so sorry.  I really handled that badly. I regret that I caused you to feel challenged and insulted by what I said, and I wish I could take it back. Will you accept my apology?  

Of course I'll accept your apology.

And to what I think is the meat of what you were trying to ask me...

I am not saying that your private correspondence can't be subpoenaed. Of course it can. But people present it as if Facebook is somehow more dangerous than any other form of correspondence. It really isn't special. If your FB messages can be subpoenaed, then so can your email, your message board posts on a private message board, even your letters you wrote on paper.

But to be subpoenaed, there has to be some sort of reason to believe there is something to be found. Otherwise, the judge will not grant the subpoena. At least that's how it works in theory. Lawyers try to go on fishing expeditions all the time but judges don't necessarily humor them. Plus, you have a lawyer too (presumably) and your lawyer can make arguments for why the subpoena is not appropriate if the judge gets a little over-eager.

It's been my personal experience that when these sorts of communications enter a lawsuit, that there is someone who is ratting out the other party. They either save the communications themselves and give them to the court or they tell the lawyer that they saw them, which then allows them to be subpoenaed because now there is cause to believe there is something to be found.

This presumes the person isn't posting crap in their statuses and has their statuses set up so everyone can see them.

I'm so relieved you accept my apology. I appreciate the benefit of your experience and firsthand exposure to what goes on in the computer world. I think I get pretty frustrated on this topic because as much as I try to tell my daughter and her friends about the dangers of posting incriminating photos on facebook and unflattering, downright stupid status and wall comments, they just don't seem to understand, or believe, how it can come back to haunt them. I don't understand why they don't believe statistics that talk about how employers routinely look at job applicants' facebook photos/posts. They must think that they are immune???

And then on the topic of privacy and the internet, what you said is correct. FB is no different than other data we enter. My son tells me you have to be mindful of anything you enter online. (He just finished his first year working as a PM for Direct X at Microsoft by the way. Of course I could not be prouder, nor more relieved he has a job!) But where I think Facebook is different, is that users are given an elaborate system of privacy settings which gives them the impression they are taking the necessary precautions to make their FB truly private. And remember that to laypeople who are not tech savvy, myself included, these settings give us a false sense of security that what we write on FB (particularly in private messages) is confidential. And as far as our legal protections go, I guess I'm a cynic on this front because I used to work on Capital Hill and I've seen how our privacy rights can be so easily trampled in the name of national security and even by politicians and corporations in a much broader, not-so-legal way. And in courts of law, judges are given so much latitude to interpret these things. You do get over-eager judges who make rulings like this:

“[W]hen Plaintiff created her Facebook and MySpace accounts, she consented to the fact that her personal information would be shared with others, notwithstanding her privacy settings. Indeed, that is the very nature and purpose of these social networking sites else they would cease to exist. Since Plaintiff knew that her information may become publicly available, she cannot now claim that she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.Â"

What is boils down to is how judges view the law. "In California your privacy settings matter. In New York they don't."
Forbes has a good summary for anyone who wants to look into this further. blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2010/09/27/do-your-social-networking-privacy-settings-matter-if-you-get-sued/

Part of me is reacting to my own fears from reading books like George Orwell's 1984. And it does not seem like so long ago that we had wackos like Joe McCarthy dredging up everyone's private lives. Sometimes I think about how closely we are monitored and categorized, using information we ourselves have entered into the big WWW, and I wonder about the possibility of a misguided adminstration's ability to use that information in ways that I don't even want to think about. With the ways that politicians, wall street and big business have so easily manipulated the system that is supposed to protect us, I honestly think anything is possible. On the other hand, I love the Internet! And I love Facebook. I just get a little paranoid about how it could be abused. Any more thoughts on my bigger concern? I really am interested because I could be worrying for nothing.

Well I think this stuff is way more complicated than we can really discuss here.

But I do think people often worry about the wrong things. The media often contributes with scary headlines about certain issues.

But, as you point out, some admin with access to the customer database can do more harm than thousands of hackers if a company doesn't have good policies in place.

OTOH, don't underestimate the power of incompetence. Many companies collect all sorts of data but can't even track the behaviors of their own customers to make better products. The data is all there but it's not in usable formats and not easily accessible. Maybe you can't figure out if the data in database A belongs to the same customer as the data in database B.

As for posting stuff on FB, I wonder if we'll get to a state where it will be like drinking in college. Everyone will be expected to have done stuff like that so no one will care. Post a "sexy" photo as your profile when you're 20? Right of passage.

For myself, I treat my FB postings as if I'm a public figure. It's a expression of public self, not my private self. I use to get together with friends and to let people know what I am up to not to bare my soul.