Defendant’s Girlfriend Arrested for Trying to Facebook Juror
To date, many people have heard stories about jurors improperly using the internet to conduct research or communicate with others. Unfortunately, the stories have become all too common. What most people don’t hear about are stories in which individuals use the internet to contact jurors. It doesn’t happen often but as the article below illustrates it can occur. What is not clear from the article is how the defendant’s girlfriend obtained the name of the juror in order to send a Friend Request.
Detroit News: Suspect’s girlfriend arrested for trying to Facebook juror deciding his …
Pontiac–A 22-year-old Goodrich woman has been jailed and faces contempt of court charges after allegedly contacting a male juror deliberating her boyfriend’s fate in a drug trial and asking him to “friend” her on Facebook.
Brianna Trovato was arrested on a bench warrant Wednesday morning outside Oakland Circuit Court after Judge Martha Anderson was informed by a juror he had received a friend request from Trovato. She had been sitting in court every day during the trial of her boyfriend, Samuel Misko, 23, also of Goodrich, who was convicted Wednesday of six counts of manufacturing with intent to deliver marijuana and six related firearms offenses…
Delaware is Working to Protect Your Digital Assets After Your Death
Last week, Delaware became the first state to adopt (codify) the Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA) (for background information on UFADAA go here). This new law will address ownership and control of digital assets after someone dies. It remains to be seen however whether other states will adopt UFADAA. Below is an excerpted article from Ars Technica discussing the protection of digital assets after death.
While some states, including Idaho and Nevada, have some existing provisions pertaining to limited digital assets for heirs, they are not as broad as the new Delaware law. For now, the state’s version of UFADAA only applies to residents of Delaware, one of the smallest states by population and land area. If other states don’t follow suit soon, people creating family trusts could conceivably use this Delaware law to their advantage, even without residing in Delaware. However, even though many tech companies (including Twitter, Facebook, and Google) are incorporated there, they will not be affected by the new law.
“If a California resident dies and his will is governed by California law, the representative of his estate would not have access to his Twitter account under HB 345,” Kelly Bachman, a spokeswoman for the Delaware governor’s office, said by e-mail.
“But if a person dies and his will is governed by Delaware law, the representative of that person’s estate would have access to the decedent’s Twitter account under HB 345. So the main question in determining whether HB 345 applies is not where the company having the digital account (i.e., Twitter) is incorporated or even where the person holding the digital account resides.”
While an important first step, Suzanne Walsh, an attorney with Cummings and Lockwood in Connecticut and chair of the UFADAA committee, told Ars that she is waiting for the most populous state to adopt its own version, which could also have an important influence on other states.
“I think California is the most important,” she told Ars. “It’s even more important that we have uniformity and uniform enactment.”
“You will not share your password”
Specifically, the new Delaware law states:
A fiduciary with authority over digital assets or digital accounts of an account holder under this chapter shall have the same access as the account holder, and is deemed to (i) have the lawful consent of the account holder and (ii) be an authorized user under all applicable state and federal law and regulations and any end user license agreement.
Typically, when a person dies, access to a digital service officially dies with them. Even giving your password to your spouse or a trusted loved one is forbidden under Facebook’s terms of service.
You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
You will not transfer your account (including any Page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission.
In 2004, Yahoo famously denied access to a US marine’s e-mail account to his family after the marine was killed in action in Iraq.
Neither Twitter, Facebook, nor Google immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.
“This problem is an example of something we see all the time in our high-tech age—our laws simply haven’t kept up with advancements in technology,” said Daryl Scott, in a statement last week. Scott is a member of the Delaware House of Representatives and the lead author of the bill. “By signing this bill into law, we’re helping to protect the rights and interests of the average person in the face of a rapidly evolving digital world.”
To read the full article go here.
Twitter Pushing to Reveal Information About National Security Requests
The article below (Twitter Weighing Legal Options on Broadcasting National Security Requests Data) discusses the efforts by Twitter to provide its users more information about the national security requests that it receives from the government. In the article, Jeremy Kessel a senior manager of global legal policy at Twitter states
…if the government will not allow us to publish the actual number of requests, we want the freedom to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be more meaningful to Twitter’s users, and more in line with the relatively small number of non-national security information requests we receive. We also pressed for the ability to be specific about different kinds of national security requests and to be able to indicate ‘zero requests’ if that applies to any particular category of request
To read the article in full go here.
More Social Media Platforms Support Facebook’s Warrant Battle with the Government
As readers of this blog are aware, Facebook is challenging the government’s broad warrant authority to seize social media information (In re 381 Search Warrants Directed to Facebook Inc. and Dated July 23, 2013). Fortunately for Facebook, they don’t have to face this battle alone. Recently, several social media platforms to include Foursquare, Kickstarter, Meetup, and Tumblr have stated that they want to assist Facebook in its ongoing fight with the government. According to an article in the New York Law Journal
They see the warrants—or data including friend lists, photos and private messages, many of them from users who have yet to be charged and may never be—as a troubling message for digital-age privacy. Facebook has said it had previously never received so many search warrants…
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which sought the data for a sweeping disabilities-benefit fraud investigation, argues that the warrants were justified. Some 134 people have been charged so far, more than half have pleaded guilty, and prosecutors have said more could be implicated…
Acting Supreme Court Justice Melissa Jackson denied a motion by Facebook to quash the warrants. She approved the 381 warrants in July 2013, saying law enforcement has authority to search massive amounts of material to seek evidence.
She also directed Facebook not to notify the affected customers about the warrants. The case was secret until it was unsealed and Facebook disclosed it in June.Facebook and its supporters say that the judge’s orders violated the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.
The Menlo Park, California-based company has turned over the information but is appealing the court order that required it to do so to the Appellate Division, First Department. The district attorney has moved to dismiss the appeal.
The case involves police and fire retirees, allegedly instructed to claim they were too psychologically devastated to work. Instead, they led robust lives—some flew helicopters, traveled overseas, did martial arts, went fishing—and sometimes aired the alleged proof of their active lives on Facebook, prosecutors say.Prosecutors have said they gave the judge 93 pages of details on why all the accounts were targeted.
But Facebook has said prosecutors cast too wide a net. Their campaign amounted to the online equivalent of searching “an entire neighborhood of nearly 400 homes,” the company said in a June court filing. The users ranged from high school students to grandparents, Facebook said.
Over the years, online companies have sometimes won, sometimes lost, in battling authorities’ demands for user information.
Social Media Platforms and Reforming Terms of Service
Wolves of the World Wide Web: Reforming Social Networks’ Contracting Practice
Michael Rustad
Thomas Koenig
Abstract:
This Article employs a content and statistical analysis of 329 terms of use (TOU) of social networking sites (SNS) to report findings from this first empirical study of these online “contracts.” Social media terms of use present two primary challenges to the law of contracts; first, they are excessively one-sided in favor of the SNS and second, the key clauses are well beyond the reading comprehension level of the average social media user. Part I provides a systematic overview of the characteristics of our sample of the world’s largest social network providers, a diverse group of websites that are headquartered in forty different countries on four continents. Part II assesses the overall readability of these social networks’ TOU, finding that they are written at an average reading level of grade 11.7, significantly above the eighth to ninth grade reading level of the typical U.S. high school graduate. More importantly, the minimum reading level required to comprehend what we call the rights-foreclosure clauses — the mandatory arbitration, limitation of liability, and disclaimer of warranty provisions — is much higher. Social network providers draft rights-foreclosure clauses slightly below the reading level of the average college graduate; grade 15.5. This statistical finding casts doubt on a fundamental premise of the law of online contract formation, that an opportunity to review is sufficient to indicate contractual consent.
Part III provides a content analysis of the qualities of the ninety-four arbitration clauses deployed by the 329 social media sites. Twenty-nine percent of all SNS (U.S. and foreign) require consumers to accede to arbitration, often in distant forums, where the cost of filing and travel far exceeds the capped damages and limited remedies afforded to the consumer. Forty-two percent of the U.S. headquartered sites mandate arbitration, while only thirteen percent of the foreign social media sites have any arbitration option. The mean arbitration clause required a reading comprehension level of grade 15. Our research shows that while hundreds of millions of consumers are subject to arbitration clauses in social media TOU, consumers filed less than ten arbitration cases in the past two years with the American Arbitration Association or JAMS, the two leading arbitration providers. This miniscule rate of arbitration filings is strong unobtrusive evidence that arbitration in SNS cases is neither cost-efficient nor a practical remedy for injured consumers. The cryptic arbitration clauses deployed by social media providers are consistently one-sided and fail to give users ample warning that they foreclose all realistic remedies for breach of contract, torts, intellectual property infringement or other causes of action.
Part IV uses the statistical findings presented in the earlier Parts to demonstrate that social networks’ TOU frequently violate nine standard provisions of the European Union’s (EU) Unfair Contract Terms Directive (UCTD) by including terms that are black listed in the EU as fundamentally unfair. We recommend that Congress enact EU-style procedural and substantive mandatory terms to address the fundamental unfairness of TOU rights-foreclosure clauses such as forced arbitration, total warranty disclaimers, and damages capped to a nominal amount. To address the problem of impenetrable TOU, providers should be required to draft TOU with a minimum readability level coupled with standardized disclosures. We also propose that Congress enact black lists of prohibited clauses and grey lists of suspect provisions modeled on the European Union’s Unfair Contract Terms Directive. Harmonizing or localizing social network consumer protections will ultimately lead to greater certainty for providers as well as protect the basic rights of global social media users.
How Brazilian Courts Use Social Media
Brazilian Courts in Social Networks: Setting a Research Agenda for Socio-Legal Studies
Rafael A. F. Zanatta
University of São Paulo Faculty of Law
Michel Roberto Oliveira de Souza
University of São Paulo Faculty of Law
Abstract: This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the social media policies created in the Brazilian Judiciary and the experience of two Brazilian Courts (STF and STJ) in the use of social networks. We explain two different cases (STF on Twitter and STJ on Facebook) and describe the role of the National Council of Justice (CNJ) in regulating the subject. Our claim is that socio-legal scholars can engage in this research area and study the effectiveness of these policies, focusing on the potential to the democratization of the Judiciary.
Twitter to Improve Policies After Robin Williams’ Daughter Bullied
One of the downsides of social media is that it facilitates online bullying. With social media, anyone can repeatedly harass another person under the cloak of anonymity. This problem was highlighted with the recent bullying of Robin Williams’ daughter (Zelda). She was sent messages blaming her for his suicide and altered pictures of her father to show bruises around his neck.
The attacks on Zelda became so intense that she abandoned both Twitter and Instagram. According to officials from Twitter, they are in the process of improving their policies to prevent this type of bullying in the future. While I doubt that Twitter or any other social media platform can completely prevent bullying, there is a lot more that they can do.
To read more about this story go here.
Sinking the Safe Harbour with the Legal Certainty of Strict Liability in Sight
Louisiana Adds Employer Social Media Access Restrictions
On August 1st, Louisiana became the 17th state to impose some type of social media restriction on employers accessing the social media accounts of employees or job applicants. The “Personal Online Account Privacy Protection Act,” codified as La. Rev. Stat. §§ 51:1951-1955, states that no employer may “request or require” any employee or job applicant to disclose the username, password, or any other authentication information related to a “personal online account.” It should be noted that this new law provides employers some exceptions to this broad prohibition against accessing the social media account of an employee or job applicant. Also, at this time, it is not entirely clear how this law will be enforced. The law on its face does not provide for a private cause of action nor does it offer administrative remedies. For a more in-depth discussion on this law go here.
Lawyers Tap Social Media in Jury Selection Process
Here is an interesting article that examines how attorneys increasingly use social media to investigate jurors.
Law Journal: Lawyers Tap Social Media in Jury Selection Process
LawandSocialMedia 