In what may be a legal first, an Australian lawyer has used the social networking site to serve legal documents on a couple who defaulted on their mortgage. In a ruling that appears to have no precedent in Internet history, the judge in this case ruled that court notices served on the site were binding!

Lawyers who had already exhausted all conventional methods to find the couple decided to get creative, and hit upon Facebook as the solution. Being keen Facebook users, the lawyers put the details provided by the couple on their mortgage application, including their e-mail addresses and dates of birth into the Facebook site.Less than a minute later, he had tracked them down.

The couple now has seven days to respond to the papers before the loan company moves to repossess their home.

This just goes to show once again that there is no-where to hide on the Internet once you sign up to the social networking sites! I try quite hard to limit the amount of data which is publicly available about me, but unless you make your account next to invisible for all but your closest contacts, people will still be able to find out some information about you. If you have been on the web for even a couple of years, your online past will still come back to haunt you - some things I created as an experiment nearly 10 years ago still pop up on google if I search for my own name!