California Court Rules Privacy Laws Dont Apply On Myspace

Think you have the right to go off and rant in your Myspace profile without being publicly quoted? Think again. There's a good chance that you won't be protected. This is what a University of California Berkeley student found out recently.

Cynthia Moreno had to get something off her chest and indeed she did. However, the fallback was devastating. In 2005 Moreno went on a rant in her online Myspace blog about how much she hated her hometown Coalinga. The title dubbed "An Ode To Coalinga" apparently didn't strike her hometown community very well.

Her high school principal, Roger Campbell, decided to print it out and submitted it to the local Coalinga Record newspaper. It was later published as a letter to the editor where it sparked outrage. After the rant hit the newspaper, the Moreno family started getting death threats. It got so bad that a bullet was fired into their home. The family was forced to shut down their 20 year old family business and move.

In the case Moreno vs. Hanford Sentinel a California court announced last week that Moreno's rant was made publicly online and "no reasonable expectation of privacy existed".

So the lesson to be learned here is that anything you post on social networking sites is public information and not protected by privacy laws. Anyone can take the content and republish it publicly. Just because you hide behind a computer doesn't mean you aren't responsible for your actions. Think before you hit that submit button.