Some subconsciously assume that Facebook is a sort of walled garden where you can control who has access to your personal information.  At least in one case, a court has ruled that this is incorrect.   Evan Brown at Internet Cases has found an interesting case, Ledbetter v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2009 WL 1067018 (D. Colo. April 21, 2009), a personal injury suit where the Wal-Mart sought information about Ledbetter from MySpace, Facebook, and Meetup in order to defend the case.  The court granted their request, but did it get the law right?

The order, unfortunately, is severely truncated.  The court does not go into in-depth legal analysis, so it is unclear whether either of the parties brought up one of the key issues in the case: the fact that the Facebook may be an electronic communication service (ECS) provider, and thereby potentially prohibited from disclosing electronic communications even when presented with a civil subpoena.  For a little bit more in discussion on what it means to be an ECS provider, take a look here.

There are a number of cases holding that providers of ECS cannot disclose communications even when presented with a civil subpoena.   While there are no cases out there  expressly holding that communications platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and the like are ECS providers, they conceivably fall within the definition in the statute.