Facebook Timestamp Used In Lawsuit Claiming Driver Was Facebooking When She Ran Over & Killed Pedestrian
from the modern-evidence dept
With all the stories these days of folks "texting while driving," it was only a matter of time until there was an attempt to claim that Facebooking-while-driving resulted in an accident. A wrongful death lawsuit in Chicago is alleging that the driver of a car in a fatal accident had just updated her Facebook status at the same time. The details of the situation are a bit confusing. Basically, a 70-year-old guy named Raymond Veloz got into an accident with another car (not the fatal accident) around 7:30 am. The two cars pulled over to the side of the road to exchange information. Closer to 8 am, another car, driven by Araceli Beas, struck Veloz, severing his leg, resulting in him bleeding to death. Veloz's daugher is now claiming in the lawsuit that Beas updated her Facebook status at 7:54 am... the exact same time that Veloz called 911 over being hit by Beas' car. Beas' mother insists that her daughter updated her status earlier, from the front of her boyfriend's house, as she waited for her car to warm up. Either way, this should make for an interesting case, as the timing of the various calls and questions about the accuracy and delay in Facebook messages and timestamps will suddenly become very, very important...Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: car accidents, facebook, timestamp
Companies: facebook
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Its probably an email routing problem ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Its probably an email routing problem ...
Sorry, I couldn't resist. If she used her cell phone then it should be recorded somewhere since they record the timestamp and size every bit of data that you send.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Its probably an email routing problem ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Its probably an email routing problem ...
You need to follow the entire path the email followed, cell phone company ... etc ... and facebook. We recently had a mail gateway-router lock up where I work it took 6 hours before someone even noticed and restarted it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Its probably an email routing problem ...
The whole interwesbs thing is created for sharing data and isn't air tight when it comes to maintaining a legality.
Ask to "Prove chain of custody"?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Its probably an email routing problem ...
Actually you should spell it HephaDorkis for it to work and be grin worthy. ;)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Its probably an email routing problem ...
The whole interwesbs thing is created for sharing data and isn't air tight when it comes to maintaining a legality.
Ask to "Prove chain of custody"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Hmmm..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Facebook is equally reliable LoL
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
A Minute Is A Long Time
They’d have to narrow the time down to the second to have any plausibility on this one.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Yep I see how that could be a problem.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
here, lets try again.
It is now 5:33am.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The same thing happens on Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, MySpace and every blog out there.
So it is scary that someone thinks that a Facebook timestamp should be enough to accuse anyone of something, it is not accurate.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well if the server is locate in a timezone that its ahead of yours 1 hour what do you think it happens?
You could post something one hour earlier and have something happen one hour after and it would appear you was multitasking when you were not.
Also did you ever stop to think how hard it is to have a server farm keep updating their clocks everyday? If you go to anywhere where there are tens of thousands of single units they all will have different times set on them, they want be all the same, they are not rated and are not required to keep perfect track of time or take into account other variables.
Even for billing companies only need to track the amount of time spent using the system not the accuracy of the time it was being used, to do that would mean billions in upgrades to very very expensive equipment.
How hard it is to understand that?
I just proved to you twice that servers can and do log different times from where the person actually is.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
See if you can recognize a pattern. Say, something like, consistently a 5 hour difference?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Zones
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Can you see the problem there?
Where are the servers located?
How time is calculate and stored on the receiving and transmitting servers?
How do you guarantee that the time send/received/generated is actually accurate?
Those are real problems and that is why IP collection is also unreliable and generates a lot of false positives, that is why people sometimes get huge bill in their cellphone accounts because somebody else usage is being charged from them by mistake.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
That is why using that to punish or absolve anybody is a risk proposition, that is why IP harvesting the way currently it is done generates so much false positives, that is why people get billed incorrectly all the time.
Now are we going to use that and risk sending innocent people to jail, I find it scary and so should you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
23:43
If the server knew that wouldn't he has shown the right time?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Heck, now is 7 LoL
My best guess is that the server tries to compensate using UTC calculations based on geolocation information, so using TOR actually can have a great impact on time shown to others also using apps to post on Facebook can and probably insert those same problems, is the raw time logged or the transformed version? was the person making a post on a day-saving timezone with a different clock?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Now I can tell you what time it was by your watch every time you post. Provided you stay at same location. Or at least remain in same time zone you are now.
The server is showing the correct time for its' time zone, not yours.
Now, if the police are investigating you at the scene of an accident, don't you think they will know what time zone you are in? That they won't be able to find out what time zone Td is operating under?
"In one simple statement, because of different timezones, errors in how to deal with that basic fact leads to a lot of errors."
Then all I can say is, be glad you aren't in Canada and having to deal with the extra complication of Newfoundlands' time zone.
I never said anything about it being proof for conviction.
But I am curious as to whether a three way was going on. No one seems to be questioning the Mothers' statement about update happening in daughters' boyfriends' driveway. Was she there? Are they neighbors?
Blinded by sun, Dec.27th, at 8am, heading SOUTH? Sun rises in the east here and would just be coming up. Need more info.
Personally, I think knowing that she accidentally killed someone while driving, is probably enough punishment.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Quote:
Maybe yes, maybe no there are other factors.
- Do the police know where the server for Facebook is located that originated the time stamp? they know her timezone, but which server created the one that is used to tag her post? you need both points and the knowledge of the time used(i.e. the clocks) along with knowledge of possible things that could have delayed the message or corrupted the time data.
- Do they know the clock of the server was functioning correctly?
- Can they trace it back?
- When its the creation of the time stamp done, when the message is received, if the server is overloaded do they cache that and delay the time stamp creation? Do the cellphone company have caches to control load? Simply put do the path have any caches between the sender and the receiver that could delay the deliver of the message?
- Did the time stamp on the server get logged raw or it is modified to reflect the timezone from where it came from?
- If it is not a raw version of the time, it is sensitive to geolocation of the machine sending the information, so if you use an app that logs in, on Facebook for you and that server is in another country it will not show the right time or if you use proxies(i.e. TOR that changes every 10 min), it will show a different time in different timezones. Simply put if there are any modification to the data information how it is calculated?
- Did the police take the time to go look for that? very important as laziness or lack of resources could impact discovery.
- There are no bugs in the system that could corrupt that data?
If you depend on the posts from Techdirt to calculate my timezone you will be sad, because I'm using TOR and that means it changes servers and locations every 10 min, which means you could be looking at any number of timezones, which reminds me that some people using mobiles use apps that have servers in different countries to post messages to Facebook, was she using anything like that?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Using the raw UTC or storing a modified version that tried to match the location of the server sending that information to it?
Nobody is asking the very important question, what could go wrong?
23:59, Sun Feb 20.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Am I now "Techdirting?"
Was I "Farking" just before this?
Was the Mother at the boyfriends overnight as well?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Now its 7 hours, the server obviously is trying to compensate probably using UTC to calculate the time and the geolocation information that it has, so probably the time you see in your screen may also be different from what I'm seeing.
23:54 Sun, Feb 20.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Does it really matter?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
texting and driving...time stamps
[ link to this | view in chronology ]