Facebook used to serve legal documents
Facebook has been used for the first time to serve legal documents to defendants who could not be be located in the real world but who could be located on the web.
A Canberra, Australia, court ordered that a judgment be served to defendants via their Facebook page when they failed to show up for court and an address for them could not be located.
“Both myself and my colleague Jason Oliver have Facebook accounts, so we thought we could access that and see if we could find them,” said attorney Mark McCormack.
The two co-defendants were listed as being friends in their Facebook profiles and their birth dates matched those of the defendants being sought, satisfying the court that these were the men.
I’ve said this to many people in private conversation, and it’s worth repeating here: if you want to be anonymous on the Internet, stay off the Internet entirely.
