I fought the law and Facebook won???

As the Facebook debate rages on over whether the creators of social media data or the companies hosting it are the real owners of this data, it’s interesting to see that innovative members of the legal system are bypassing the whole discussion and saying, “The data is public and we are going to use it.”

Consider this example from New Zealand. A young mother was convicted after using the Internet to declare a relationship she was concealing from welfare authorities. She had reported that she was a single mom and was thus eligible for $480 a week. But Web 2.0-savvy investigators checked out her Bebo and Facebook pages to find the truth: She was living with the father of her 2-year-old son, entitling her to only $140 a week. The convicted mom commented, “It came as a big surprise when I was caught. I didn’t ever think they would look me up like that.”

Read the whole article here on Internet Evolution