It's often legally admissible to bring conversations, postings and messages from social networks into courtroom debates. Protect yourself and your organization by capturing what's said about you.
These days, courtroom evidence bags aren’t just made up of fingerprinted objects, weapons or even trails of computer printed paperwork. Modern court cases are now including evidence found on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, just to name a few. More and more often, judges are identifying these tools as justifiable evidence and allowing them to enter their courtrooms, whether it’s to prove or argue against concepts such as defamation, libel, competitive intellectual property sharing, etc. (Of course, those are primarily business-related issues, and courtrooms are also filled with social media evidence related to divorces, traffic violations and even more serious crimes.) Communications posted on these sites are not private messages, as some might believe. Instead, regardless of privacy settings, it’s often found legally admissible to bring conversations, postings and messages into courtroom debates.
Surety's Take: Social networking has been intertwined into the majority of our lives, both on personal and professional levels. The line between the two lifestyles is blurred and more often than not, they end up overlapping into a gray area. There ends up being countless conversations taking place online, all of which can be monitored with the right technologies and potentially brought to the attention of legal experts.
AbsoluteProof WebSeal, for example, is Surety’s tool that allows you to capture and timestamp website evidence. Because social media content can easily be removed, WebSeal will capture a Tweet, MySpace post, blog entry, etc. (or any Internet-based content for that matter), record the exact time, date it was posted, and the author’s name, before any manipulation occurs. This way, legal professionals can see, without a doubt, that a particular message did in fact exist, in the documented way, at a particular point in time.
So if you’re looking for a way to protect yourself online and want a way to capture what’s being said about you, your company or its employees, take a look at AbsoluteProof WebSeal’s capabilities and see how it can save you time, money and resources when it comes to evidence capture and retrieval. If you’re on the other end of the spectrum and are worried that your social media activity will be questioned, you might want to start thinking twice about what you post. You never know who might amongst your audience members.