22 Jun Foreclosure Gone Social?

I read this interesting article today and had to share my opinion!

The article reads, “With roughly 4 million foreclosures in the pipeline in this country, some legal experts say it’s just a matter of time until lenders win the right to serve foreclosure documents through the giant social network.”

Seriously? I have seen Facebook used to gather relevant information on a prospective employee, client, or collecting a debt… but never as a vehicle to serve legal information.

Reportedly, a couple in Australia was identified on Facebook using names and birthdates and served foreclosure notices. The right was upheld because the couple did not enable privacy protection on their account (reconsidering your own privacy settings now?) and the frequency of posts was used to determine that they indeed, would receive the notification.

That’s a stretch, don’t you agree? We help clients have a consistent presence over social media daily, which includes monitoring and responding to comments; what’s to guarantee anyone would see something this time sensitive and important over social media??

Do you think it’s appropriate to use social networks to find people and deliver legal papers to them via the network?

Email is currently not considered by courts to be a safe or reliable way to deliver legal notices due to spam possibilities and the fact that people don’t always open every email they receive.  So why is Facebook different? And how can a judge decide whether or not you will see a legal notice based on how many days you’ve been active posting updates?

If this is the future of Facebook, I think we’re going to see the level of participation decline rapidly.

We’d love to hear your comments below – after you’re back from changing your privacy settings on your Facebook page!