Public Service Announcement

So I've seen a number of friends now post something very legal-sounding as their status on Facebook. It purports to be a warning/notice to anyone, including government agents, that they do not have permission to monitor your Facebook stuff and that they can't go after you for anything you post online. It goes like this:

PRIVACY NOTICE: Warning - any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited to the United States Federal Government also using or monitoring/using this website or any of its associated websites, you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of my profile information nor any of the content contained herein including, but not limited to my photos, and/or the comments made about my photos or any other "picture" art posted on my profile.

You are hereby notified that you are strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein. The foregoing prohibitions also apply to your employee , agent , student or any personnel under your direction or control.

The contents of this profile are private and legally privileged and confidential information, and the violation of my personal privacy is punishable by law. UCC 1-103 1-308 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

It even cites to some federal law at the end there. Hey, boom! You're covered.


Yeah, about that.

I realize I absolutely risk coming off like some know-it-all douchebag with what I'm about to say, but I have to say it anyway (heck, maybe I actually *am* a know-it-all douchebag). And I'm really not trying to make anyone feel silly for having posted it. I'm just saying this as, well, a public service announcement just in case anyone thinks the above disclaimer protects them from anything. I don't know where that came from or how it started making the rounds but it's completely meaningless, except perhaps as just some statement on your part that in your opinion the government should not be monitoring your personal business. In which case, fine, I agree with you, but please don't be misled into thinking that your opinion has some force of law, because it doesn't.

First of all, the federal law cited there is from, you'll notice, "UCC." Buried in the deepest recesses of my mind, in a horrible and dark place, I remember the UCC. From Contracts class. UCC stands for "Uniform Commercial Code." I had to look the specific sections up because lord knows I didn't retain any of it from law school, but the first section has some general language about the code being intended to be liberally applied, and the second section refers to maintaining your rights to dispute something about a contract even while you're performing it. Nothing in there about your right to privacy at all, let alone what you can do to protect yourself from violation of it by the government. So the legal citation doesn't have squat-all to do with the language of the disclaimer.

And the disclaimer itself would have the average government agent snickering, if s/he even bothered to notice it. In a post-Patriot Act America, the government can in many cases monitor your freaking phone calls. It's hardly settled law that you have an inviolate privacy interest in direct email communications. Nobody's going to think twice about gathering information that you've chosen to make public. And, social media sites like Facebook are basically public. The fact that you limit the forum to certain friends of your choosing by mucking with whatever privacy settings Mark Zuckerberg has decided to let you have, doesn't make your communications on there private.

Bottom line: If you have a privacy interest in something--personal information, a picture, a communication--and you want to protect it, the way to do that isn't by posting a disclaimer. It's by not posting the information online in the first place.