The Ethics Of "Friending"

As users constantly update their Facebook and other social networking profiles, they may be unwittingly doing something else as well: creating a cache of evidence for a future adversary to use against them in discovery and at trial.  Trial courts have increasingly allowed parties to discover the private portions of social networking sites when doing so would likely lead to the disclosure of admissible evidence.¹  In the common scenario, a party observes information on the public portion of their adversary's profiles that tends to undercut that adversary's claims' such as pictures of a plaintiff skiing after claiming to have devastating injuries' and present such information to the court as the "factual predicate" that establishes the potential relevance of the private profile.²  While most courts will not allow a party to simply conduct a "fishing expedition" into their adversary's private digital lives, nor will they declare such information categorically