Will 'like' and 'comment' be followed by 'issue proceedings'?
A US District Judge has recently ruled that Chase Bank is unable to serve papers via Facebook, suggesting that they may want to try the local papers instead.
In New Zealand, this method of serving papers (called 'substituted service') isn't unusual where the defendant is difficult to serve personally. In Axe Market Gardens v Axe (HC Wellington, CIV 2008-485-002676, 16 March 2009) the High Court ruled that substituted service by email and facebook was permitted.
The key difference in the Chase Bank case is that there wasn't sufficient evidence that the person they wanted to serve maintained the Facebook account (posts, comments etc) or even that it was her at all (there was no evidence that she checked the email associated with the account or was even her email address.
Given the growth of fake or multiple Facebook profiles, will this be a problem down the road?
No comments:
Post a Comment