Emil Protalinski writes:
Back in September, a US judge ruled that a school district violated the First Amendment (freedom of speech) and Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure) rights of a 12-year-old student by forcing her to hand over her Facebook password to school officials who in turn used it to search for messages they deemed inappropriate. This month, another US judge has ordered that women suing their employer for sexual harassment must hand over cell phones, passwords to their email accounts, blogs, as well as to Facebook and other social networks.
The lawsuit, now over a year old, was brought to US district court by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and 20 to 22 women who worked at the Original HoneyBaked Ham. On November 7 (PDF), the case took quite a turn when Magistrate Judge Michael E. Hegarty ordered the group of women to hand over account passwords so that a court-appointed forensic expert can review what they said about the case on the social network, as first reported by Eric Goldman (via Ars Technica).
Read more on The Next Web. The post referred to is by Venkat Balasubramani, not Eric Goldman, but is on Eric’s excellent blog.