Its not news that Facebook has become highly relevant in divorce litigation. Facebook changed how its search engine accesses posts, however, and this has implications as to how you should post if you are in litigation, or contemplating possible divorce.
Video Embedded: https://youtu.be/-pvszY6y2mU
Timothy Conlon discusses digital forensics in divorce
Providence Journal video by Steve Szydlowski
For starters, the best advice is still the simplest – if you don’t want a judge to see a post, don’t post it at all. Throwing up every event in your life is inviting public scrutiny. If your in a divorce or custody battle, privacy is the best policy. Even if your posts aren’t found because of the changes discussed below, you can be compelled to produce them in litigation, or sanctioned for deleting them. So the easy answer is don’t post.
Of course not all folks are certain they are heading into litigation, nor do they want to live under the burden of surveillance. Here’s where understanding what has changed at Facebook, and what options you have comes in.
Early Facebook searches returned people or company pages, and ignored individual posts. Those days are gone. But wait, there’s more. When FB opened up post data to its search engine – it initially did it for friends only. In other words you searched your friends posts. Now its PI heaven – when you search you see all public posts.
The tactical response is simple- make your posts accessible to friends only. Does the whole world really need to know where you ate last night? Do you want a private investigator looking at that data?
For a walkthrough, go https://www.wired.com/2015/10/facebook-search-privacy/
