A Bengaluru court has denied a husband’s plea to avoid paying his wife maintenance because of her social media updates. The court underlined the Supreme Court’s 2017 take that capability to earn is not the same as income, and highlighted the perils of oversharing. The husband proffered her engineer wife’s qualifications and pictures on LinkedIn and Facebook to suggest that she earned enough to support herself and their child. The court pointed out that the wife was unemployed when she had filed for divorce on the ground of domestic violence and awarded her maintenance. The case reminds us that the practice of scouring social media profiles to find clues about the income status of a spouse, borrower or a scammer’s target is getting more sophisticated. Oversharing was always déclassé; now it may be dangerously revelatory, too.
