on Facebook and Identity
Very interesting post appeared on the ABC news site titled 'Lawyer uses Facebook to serve documents'. A Canberra court has approved using Facebook as a way to serve documents. Apparently, the co-defendants have been hard to reach but there are Facebook accounts which list them as friends and has their birth dates. This would seem to be enough for the judge to qualify Facebook as a legitimate way of serving them. It would be great to see the full transcript that outlines this decision because quite a bit more information would really be needed to properly identify a person. Somehow I don't think I can walk into a bank and have an account created simply by pointing to a website with a claimed birth date and list of friends - that's why they have the 100 point checklist. Claiming identity and authenticating identity are worlds apart. Think of your favourite celebrity. How many sites are there of them that contain far more personally identifying information on them than a birth date and list of friends yet are not maintained at all by the celebrity. What about sites that masquerade as people. It's not difficult to setup an account on social networking sites masquerading as someone else (see this post discussing a number of fake John Howard Facebook accounts). Some services, such as ClaimId, offer an attempt for you to (re)establish your digital identity. Web personalities such as Leo Laporte use this to try to help them. So that's one problem. But just like defendants may not often be at home, what guarantee is there that they will access their Facebook accounts or receive notification that there has been an attempt to contact them via it? Will logs be requested of social networking service providers, ISPs etc in an effort to prove such accounts have been accessed by the 'claimed identities' of the account holders? How many social networking accounts have you opened that you no longer access or particularly care about? How many have you forgotten about? It would seem to me there are a whole lot of potential challenges to this judgment but it certainly highlights the importance of your digital identity(s)!
technorati tags: Facebook, Identity,social networking
