Privacy

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Deleting information in the digital world can be a problematic issue. A Web site that appears to a viewer to present unitary pages of text and images actually consists of text and graphic elements that can be drawn from a variety of sources. For a variety of technical reasons, it is not unusual for text elements included in a Web page to be stored on one server and the images to be stored on another, even where the Web page, the text and image elements are all the property of a single entity. When references to text or images are deleted from the HTML code that makes up a Web page, the text and image files themselves may remain exactly where they were, still accessible directly via their original URL addresses, or via a search engine.

Security researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK recently studied this issue in the context of social networking sites. They found that for a variety of reasons, when users delete references to images that they have uploaded to social networking sites, those images may remain accessible for a period of time after they have been “deleted” by the user.

A recent judicial opinion also briefly addressed the phenomenon of “zombie” photos, in the context of a dispute between a law firm and a group of its former associates, and a claim of violation of the right of publicity.

“People who live in glass houses should dress in the basement.” That’s an old kid’s joke (if you remember) which came to mind while reading the opinion in Sandler v. Calcagni, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 54374 (D. Me. July 16, 2008). Kids joke or no, it suggests the reasonable principle that people who want their private lives to remain private should not be posting private information on a publicly accessible social networking site.

Posting personal information on social networking sites has become more problematic as job recruiters, and now attorneys conducting discovery or vetting jury pools, are looking to these sites for revealing information about potential hires, adversaries, witnesses and prospective jurors.