Law Students Need to Mind Their Online Personas

Legal Blog “The Shark” is discussing how the Florida Bar considered, almost decided to start requiring applicants to submit their Facebook passwords so that the Bar could examine their online activities as part of the “character exam”. The blog lists several reasons why this is complete beyond appropriate. And they are not the typical whiny “but I deserve to be a fool and no one be allowed to see if” arguments. Their points often affect third parties – not just those choosing to enter the legal profession. Among the arguments:

1.  The Florida Bar will have access to information it could never legally ask for (e.g., sexual orientation, religions affiliation, etc.).  The policy welcomes itself to all sorts of discrimination.

2.  The Bar asks applicants for their identity and password, which give the Bar access not only to applicants’ personal information, but to the personal, private information of their friends as well.  Applicants’ Facebook friends never signed up, and never intended, to have their personal information shared with the Florida Bar.

3.  The Facebook terms of use prohibit the very behavior in which the Florida Bar seeks to engage.

Thankfully, Florida decided not to do this. But, they didn’t decide based on the above factors. No, they just realized applicants will simply delete all the negative stuff from their profiles before submitting them. While it is good to see some common sense come into play, it does still disturb me that they don’t seem to care about the previously stated privacy problems.

The more concerning part is that Florida is not alone in this consideration. The Virginia Workers’ Compensation Committee, a state agency, sued to try to compel Facebook to reveal information from a claimant’s profile. Luckily, Facebook didn’t just hand the data over, and instead fought back:

Facebook had objected to the June 4 subpoena from Colgan Air–the Manassas, Va.-based company that operates under the names United Express, US Airways Express, and Continental Connection–on privacy grounds. It said federal law prohibits divulging user data in response to a subpoena, and promised to “further litigate this issue by seeking, among other things, an injunction from the federal courts.” Eventually, the commission backed down, but it scary to think the social network had to officially object in court before the state agency granted any substance to their objection.

Lesson to everyone – be mindful of whats on your social network profile, you don’t know who is trying to see it, or for what purpose.