Every Breath You Take: The Auto-Logging of Your Online Life

Every breath you take. Every move you make. Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you.

Who sang that? Sting, right? Sure, but it would be just as accurate to have those same lyrics sung by the social networking platforms included in the online services many people use regularly.

Yes, just like the song "Every Breath You Take" — which, when you're belting it out in the car, seems innocent enough, but leaves you feeling a little creeped out — your life is being logged (and sometimes shared) through your online meanderings. Many times, we are willing, knowing participants.

And then...there are those "other" times.

So while you might want to very quietly break up with your significant other ("Every bond you break"), Facebook defaults to proclaiming to the world "JOHN DOE IS NO LONGER IN A RELATIONSHIP."

And while you might want to discreetly join your buddies for some fantasy football ("Every game you play"), your Yahoo! Pulse profile (yes, you probably have one, even if it is non-searchable) is quietly updating itself with this information.

And when you guiltily hop on Grooveshark in the mid-afternoon ("Every move you make") to re-listen to your latest obsession...it's not like Grooveshark is letting the entire online music-loving community keep tabs on you, right?

Note that each of these sites logged the person's name or avatar, the triggering event, the exact time this activity occurred, and, in the latter two cases, gave a clickable link for more information.

...Oh can't you see? You belong to me.

So what does this mean for readers of this blog? Well, attorneys should keep in mind that users' online electronic breadcrumbs are often more voluminous than they think. Status updates as alibis are no longer speculation, but reality; just ask Rodney Bradford, who had his criminal charges dropped after it was discovered that he'd updated his status just moments before the alleged crime took place.

While Facebook is one of the most popular in the "voluntary update, voluntary sharing" realm, it certainly isn't the only platform to look into. In the geolocation arena, for instance (in which users perform an online "check in" to a physical location upon arrival), there's Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, brightkite, and more. Such services may be used to help establish a user's location at a specific time.

Finally, there are a huge number of online services that track user activity much more discreetly, and often without user's knowledge. (For instance, did you know your Taylor Swift addiction was being automatically recorded onto a neat, detailed, shared-by-default timeline?)

Whether drafting subpoenas, having an ESI conference, or performing e-discovery, keep top of mind the many ways in which our daily lives are logged, and consider how they can be useful to your case. More and more, attorneys are being allowed access to users' private online and social networking information, so don't automatically assume that a "reasonable expectation of privacy" can't be overcome.

From the user perspective, whenever you sign up for a new online service, your first stop should always be the privacy tab. Be sure you're OK with what's being shared; do a quick risk assessment, and decide whether this application having access to your information is worth whatever risks do exist.

"Is me sharing this information with the world worth the networking opportunities / free games / new music that this service provides? Can I turn off the 'sharing' feature and not lose out of the capabilities most important to me?"

For some services, you probably wouldn't miss out on the sharing features. But an anti-social Facebook? There's an idea that wouldn't have made it out of Harvard.