Tiger Woods’ house of cards fell when a series of cell phone texts were discovered by his wife. No longer does a spouse look for lipstick on the collar or credit card receipts, they merely have to reach for a cell phone or a computer, to identify infidelity. These digital mediums that have come to simplify our lives are now the center of many divorce cases, governmental investigations and employee fraud cases.
"Texting is the new lipstick on the collar," said Parry Aftab, a privacy and Internet safety lawyer told "Good Morning America." "People don't think when they're having an affair, they don't think when they're leaving a trail of cyber bread crumbs behind them that their spouse may see. They'll log on, they'll take pictures, they'll text, thinking somehow, because it's on their cell phone, nobody will see it."
Further Aftab talks about how technology that you use to communicate with others can come back to haunt you. "You do it when you're bored, you do it when you've got nothing else to do, you're doing it because you've thought about something and there's nothing in between the 'Gee, should I?' and doing it, other than the click of a key," Aftab said. "We need to realize that if you're doing it in the digital world, there is a digital footprint."
Divorce cases at times can be salacious but now with text messages, emails, FaceBook, etc. the handwriting is on the wall, so to speak. Mitchell Karpf, a family law specialist who is chairman of the American Bar Association, says text messages can make or break a divorce case. "What happens, typically, is that one spouse denies a certain conduct that he or she may be engaging in and instead of engaging in a 'he said, she said,' what happens is there's concrete evidence," he said. "It's right there in black and white what has transpired, and there's no going back from that."
Employers are now searching the Internet prior to hiring a new employee finding everything from their party habits to where they went on vacation. Many insurance fraudsters are being caught via these web sites after they post pictures and videos which contradict their purported work injury, leaving them open to criminal prosecution. There is now a list of the Top Ten people caught on Facebook:
Facebook Follies
1. The White House Gate Crashers
8. Jonathan Parker is ... allegedly breaking into a house
9. The Next Front in the Health Care Debate?
A recent case of mine, at The R.D.D.Detective Agency, was cracked with the help of Twitter. I was asked to track down a B-list celebrity who was avoiding service. I tracked her through Twitter and her “Tweet” stated she was leaving her medical office heading for a specific restaurant. Quick action by a process server ended the pursuit before she finished her last bite.
Digital mediums leave a trail that can lead to one’s downfall. If you have something to hide, think long and hard before you digitally distribute it. Your next “Tweet” could cost you everything.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1943680_1943678_1943557,00.html
Comments
Ok so Tiger Woods asked for us to respect his privacy… Is he in any position to make such a request? I agree, when it comes to the children, privacy should be respected. But Tiger is a grown man. Some sports news sites like Dozensport.com say he slept around and used his 'public image' to bed women, now he wants us all to back off. The switch of fame cannot be so easily turned off, Tiger.
A couple of things come to mind. First, the suspicious wife of someone I knew some years ago read the “Deleted Items” file in the email program on his computer. He had deleted emails he didn’t want anyone to read but failed to empty the Deleted Items file and was caught. Another thought is that the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures in the U.S. Constitution is often interpreted to mean that a person’s actions and statements are protected against seizure and use by the government if they are taken or spoken under circumstances where there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy”. Whether the expectation of privacy is reasonable is determined on an objective standard by a court and has often surprised defendants whose subjective expectations were different. I would imagine that the level of obsession that would be required to anticipate and hide every track successfully would make whatever one is sneaking off to do a lot less fun.
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