People have been raving about the decreasing degree of privacy one has with so many technological developments that have occurred in the last decade. The wide-spread use of the internet has deepened the feeling that people are being more and more easily watched by others.

In Australia, the popular social networking website Facebook has become a tool of the law. Recently, a court from Down Under has approved the use of Facebook as a means of notifying a couple that they had lost their home as a result of defaulting on a loan.

Lawyer Mark McCormack was the one who used Facebook for the first time in order to serve legally binding documents, as past attempts to serve the couple failed. The methods used before using Facebook were the traditional postal service and the more modern e-mail. Precedents existed concerning e-mails and text messages – courts sometime allow lawyers to serve people by e-mail or text messages, if people could not be served in person.

Mark McCormack is confident that this method is viable and will be used in the future as a legal method of serving people who are otherwise unreachable. Unfortunately, the profiles of the couple could not be accessed by the time McCormack’s novel idea was approved by a court.

The reason why Facebook is being considered as a serving means is that it has grown in popularity during the last few years, attracting more that 140 million users worldwide, in just 4 years since it was launched.