Who cares about your Facebook status updates?!?!
I don’t know about you guys but I have some friends on my Facebook account that will constantly tell you what they are doing, eating, watching on TV, or listening to on their IPods…like who cares that much!?! Maybe they have nobody else to talk to and tell them what they are doing or maybe they actually think that people care that they just ate an entire pizza by themselves and are now going to sit down and watch Transformers 2! I barely update my status each week let alone each action I make. I just don’t care that much about what my fellow Facebookers had for dinner that I won’t bother them with the fact that I just ate some chicken tortilla soup and am now catching up on the latest Modern Family episode.
However, in 19-year old Rodney Bradford’s case his status update wondering where his IHOP food was saved him from serving some hard time in jail. It was on the night of October 17 at 11:49 am that he updated his Facebook status asking where his pancakes where that was his lifesaver. The next day he was arrested as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut House in Brooklyn, where he lives that the status became his alibi. He told his lawyer about the entry he had made in his Facebook account that took place during the suspected robbery that he was accused of committing. The district attorney then subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status was written from a computer at Mr. Bradford’s address where he lives. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.
I am not so sure about this case because who is to say that Rodney Bradford is the one that wrote the status update. He could have easily thought ahead (although unlikely) and had someone post the status update for him. I mean whenever I use my boyfriends computer I never click on ‘log out’ I just close the browser and then later on he will get on his computer to log in to his Facebook account and it will automatically bring up my account. It will sometimes even be hours before he will go on after I have gone on and it still lets you into my account. He always jokes that he is going to put something dumb as my status update. When I saw Mr. Bradford’s story in the newspaper I thought I cannot believe that he is getting off the hook because of Facebook. Facebook really is taking over if it’s counting as an alibi in the court system. This is the first case that a Facebook status has been used to get someone out of trouble. It was a simple robbery charge but what is next? Could Facebook be used in a lot of future trials and cases where something more serious has happened? How can they prove that it was the actual owner of the account and not just some hacker…or a boyfriend that came along and put something because I never officially clicked ‘log-out’. It’s actually kind of scary to think of I think. When I signed up for my Facebook account in September back in 2005 I never thought that I was getting myself into something that would grow this popular.
Do you think that Facebook should be used as alibis in the courts? Is it reliable?
