ABSTRACT
In a 2006 New Jersey case, Pietrylo et al. v. Hillstone Restaurant Group, bartender Brian Pietrylo and waitress Doreen Marino sued after their termination by Houston’s Restaurant (Hillstone) for posting derogatory and obscene comments on a password-protected MySpace profile, claiming that in their restricted group, privacy-protected postings were not meant for public viewing. A third employee was allegedly coerced into providing her log-in information to a manager, who shared the site’s contents with other managers, who fired Pietrylo and Marino. A New Jersey court held, and the New Jersey Federal District Court affirmed, that the restaurant’s managers violated the Stored Communications Act and the New Jersey Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act by accessing the MySpace page without authorization. However, the court ruled on an invasion-of-privacy claim that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation of privacy on MySpace.3 A federal jury awarded the two a total of $3,400 in back pay and $13,600 in punitive damages.4
