Educational News

Courts Are Using Facebook to Serve Legal Papers

Facebook isn’t just for friends and family anymore. Insurance companies have been using the social networking website to catch disability insurance cheats, and spouses are spying on their soon-to-be exes, looking for dirt to increase alimony, or win a child custody battle. Well, now there’s a new wrinkle: Courts are using Facebook to serve legal papers to announce, say, that you’re being sued. Or that your bank’s foreclosing on your house. If lawyers involved can prove to the judge that you can’t be located by phone, fax, at work, or at any current or former address, it’s becoming acceptable to message you on Facebook – or post a notice on your wall for all the world to see. It started two years ago when an Australian lawyer sent a foreclosure notice via Facebook to someone they could only find online. The practice spread rapidly across the UK and Canada, and now to the U.S.

Is posting legal announcements online an invasion of privacy? Not according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. They point out that court documents in the U.S. are already public – and can be viewed by anybody who orders a copy. All the court really cares about is that the parties involved are successfully notified of an impending legal action. All the lawyers have to do is find enough information to prove that the person with the Facebook page is the same person they’re looking for, and that the page is checked often enough to prove that they’ll actually get the message. So, if you’re dodging creditors, your bank, or your soon-to-be ex, you can now be legally served court papers on Facebook. So, you might want to revisit your security settings.