Personal Injury Plaintiffs Should Avoid Using Facebook Advises Meyerkord & Meyerkord Law Firm

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A woman who was injured falling off an office chair recently sued the chair's maker, Steelcase, for designing a faulty chair. Steelcase thought the woman should turn over private information from her Facebook page, including pictures, despite her use of Facebook's "privacy" settings... and a judge agreed. He thought that the publicly-available information might disprove her claims of harm and injury.

Facebook sided with the woman, arguing that turning over its private information would violate the Stored Communications Act. Still, the court ordered the private pages turned over to Steelcase.

Steelcase then argued that pictures on the woman's Facebook page "reveal[ed] that she has an active lifestyle and can travel, and apparently engages in many other physical activities." For a lady claiming serious personal injuries and a decreased quality of life, it didn't look good.

The judge's ruling raises important issues for every citizen, and especially for people injured in car accidents, injured at the workplace, or who suffer because of somebody else's negligence. In today's legal and electronic worlds, what we decide to post on the Internet is likely to become completely public at some point. Even though we might use privacy settings on websites like Facebook, there is no guarantee that those settings can really guarantee privacy. And if they do, that guaranty can always be over-ruled... by a judge.

Pictures can be misleading, depending on how they're presented and what's said about them. It's more important now than ever before that, if you've been hurt or injured and you're thinking about legal help recovering what you deserve, you make sure that your online personality reflects your real-world personality.

It's said that pictures are worth a thousand words, and that can be true in court; but sometimes, those words can be twisted to be misleading. So, it's best to take the safer road: if you've been hurt and you're thinking about legal action, make sure that your public web-pages are safe. Make sure there isn't anything online that could be twisted and used against you. If it can be, it likely will be.

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