CAUTION: What information you provide on your Facebook page, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter could cost you money that you deserve in your personal injury case.
Although most people use social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and My Space as a way of reconnecting with old friends and keeping up with current friends, these websites are also used for purposes other than relationship building.
What you may not know is that insurance companies also use social internet sites and other internet sites to learn about your life and gain access to your personal information. Insurance companies know that they can glean an abundance of personal information about accident victims through their social networking sites. In order to try to damage your accident case, they will search the internet for any and all information that could make you look bad.
Insurance adjustors, claims adjusters, investigators and defense attor-neys scour the internet, aware of the vast amount o information offered freely by people online. Whether on a personal web page, blog, or other website such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or Twitter, to name a few, the information to be found can be a goldmine for building a case against claimants.
This technique of surfing online for information on an accident victim is "internet surveillance." The information on the sites may be relevant to litigation, especially in the context of a personal injury claim.
They will view:
Pictures you post; pictures friends post of you; videos you post; activities you talk about; your work activities; any relationships that you may have.
Your accident case could potentially be ruined by the information that you provide on social media sites, video sites, and photo sites.
If you have been in an accident, you need to be aware of what you and others put on the internet about you before you bring a case against the person responsible for the accident. Even if you think your posts are perfectly innocent, insurance companies will take bits and pieces of information about you and use it to try to build their case against you. In addition to being aware of what you post and what others post about you on the internet, it is also a good idea to increase your privacy settings so that insurance companies and other people who you may not want seeing your private and personal information do not have full access to your profile.
No comments:
Post a Comment