Poke, You’ve Been Served

Could being served soon become as easy as being Facebook poked? As crazy as this may seem there is a possibility of just that very thing coming to pass if certain Texas lawmakers have their say. Currently, of course the old system of physically serving papers to people is the tried and tested method, but if Representative Jeff Leach has his way process servers may become obsolete.

The proposal, as crazy as it may sound, is that social media sites for example Google+, Facebook or Twitter be used to serve the papers. This would be done in the form of a message sent to the account of the person to be served. This would obviously be a lot safer because process servers would not have to meet face to face with sometimes violent criminals who do not want to be served.

So, would this work? Certainly it would streamline a complicated process and save a lot of money. However, the issue is that with such a system you can’t be sure the served party has received the message. This in itself might well be enough to have this new conceptual law kicked out before it even gets started. The system just seems too open to both abuse and failure to make it really viable. So, don’t expect to be receiving your court summons on Facebook anytime soon it will probably come from that guy disguised as a UPS driver.