People love their smartphones and all the amazing things that the devices can do for them.

They are not always aware, however, about all the amazing things that they can do for others.

One group that is on the plus side are divorce lawyers, who can now demand evidence that corroborate an alibi or blow it out of the water. You can’t keep saying that you stayed home in Maine if the GPS feature on your phone tells the court that you were at a fancy restaurant in Boston (and your Facebook page shows a picture of who you were with).

If the government required us to carry a sensor that kept track of where we went, what we read, who we talked to and how we spent our money, we would rightly revolt.

Millions of us, however, do this to ourselves, creating a treasure trove of information for people who, for commercial or other reasons, want to know what we are up to. Some cellphone companies hold onto customer data for years, and everyone should expect to see their text messages reappear if they are in the middle of a messy divorce or other legal dispute.

The advance in communications technology is an amazing thing. A lot of litigants likely are wondering whether carrying around that smart phone was such a smart thing to do.

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