Thursday, January 27, 2011

In the context of litigation anyone's facebook privacy settings are overcome

In U.S. courts, Facebook posts become less private

To read full article click "In U.S. courts" above. See quote below.

"This is beginning to catch on across the country," said Jim Dempsey, vice president of public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a liberal think tank. "You do have a right of privacy in your private Facebook postings. But in the context of litigation, that right can be overcome." end quote.

My daughter is 14 and so all of her friends are also around this age mostly. So, since the average teenager now sends about 1700 phone texts and facebook and other social media entries a month, I could see how this might be a problem for them once they reach 18 and over because everything even if it is deleted  on their private devices isn't necessarily deleted on Computer servers which transfer the information from one device to another worldwide. And these computer servers could theoretically be accessed by any court in the nation or the  world at any present or future time as long as the memory storage of those servers remained intact.

Note: Servers are specialized computers built to run the internet and usually located (by the thousands) in places like Silicon Valley and other places around the world that make the internet work. When anyone clicks on a word button on any web page these servers act on the command of your word button that you just clicked at the speed of your bandwidth that is presently available to you in that moment of time. However, they also store information regarding what you clicked, wrote, texted etc. because that is a part of the process of what they do. The design isn't necessarily to access what you are doing. Rather the design is to ensure accuracy of any transmissions through the server to protect against lost bits of information during problems which can be software or hardware or power outages. And of course, the biggest problem that storing bits of information is necessary for is when something cannot be accessed immediately because of an internet traffic jam. Since the internet is designed to run instantaneously through flowing traffic over electrons which tend to move toward the speed of light, traffic jams are notorious for losing information. So servers protect the internet in this way by storing any request or any information moving or trying to move, until it can move. However, unless it fills completely up with information and automatically or manually is deleted, then that information will be there until that server is non-functional, removed, or just replaced with something newer or better. Also, unless the devices at that home or office only access the same server each time (knowing that there are thousands of servers likely just in Silicon Valley alone) finding where the server storage memory that that information is located on might be impossible.

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