You run the local 5K race and share the pictures of your finish line triumph on Facebook. Your wife posts a photo on Instagram of you up on a ladder, cleaning the gutters. Your friend tags you in a tweet, letting the world know that you’re on a weekend hiking trip.
For most people, such posts and photos aren’t a big deal; after all, social media is designed to let us share what’s happening in our lives with friends and family. If you are in the midst of a disability insurance claim, though, or you’re appealing a denied claim, even seemingly innocent photos and posts about your everyday life can hurt you. Disability lawyers for cases in New Jersey and other states know social media has become an important tool for insurance companies determined to not only prevent fraud but also find any reason to deny an otherwise legitimate claim. Discover the easy way to buy disability insurance online, click here.
Fighting Fraud At the Expense of the Innocent
There’s no denying insurance fraud is a serious issue. According to insurance industry experts, payments for bogus claims cost as much as $80 billion annually, accounting for as much as 10 percent of all health care spending. However, the prevalence of fraud has made it more difficult for legitimately disabled policyholders to collect the payments they deserve. Investigators now mine social media profiles of claimants as a matter of course, looking for evidence contradicting what the claimant is telling the insurance company.
Attorneys know there are several problems with this approach. While insurers claim social media evidence only serves as a launching pad for further investigation and is not used as the sole evidence to deny a claim or stop payments, attorneys argue social media evidence does not always tell the whole story. For example, investigators may find photos that were taken before the disability began, or not understand the context of a post, such as when the post is a joke or referring to something unrelated to the case.
More troubling, experts say, is the assumption that a disability means that one cannot participate in any type of pleasurable activities. Most people hire a social security disability lawyer and file a disability claim because they can no longer perform the tasks associated with their jobs, not that they are necessarily bedridden.
For example, being unable to perform brain surgery any longer due to an arm injury does not mean that a surgeon can no longer go on vacation with his or her family or enjoy a backyard barbecue. Again, social media evidence often lacks context, meaning claimants must defend themselves against demands for more evidence or inappropriately denied claims.
Protecting Yourself from Social Media Investigations
You might be thinking such investigations constitute an invasion of privacy and should not be allowed. But the law is clear on how investigators can collect such evidence, and in some cases, it is perfectly legal.
In short, anything that is publicly viewable, such as your Facebook feed, is admissible as evidence. Investigators can only use publicly available information and cannot use anything they accessed via deceit or illegal means; i.e., they cannot pose as a potential friend or follower in order to see your profiles or hack into your accounts to gather evidence.
Because investigators can see and use anything that is public, it’s important to take steps to protect yourself and prevent your social media postings from negatively affecting your disability claim. Some of the steps to take include:
- Current privacy settings. Manage your privacy settings to prevent anyone who is not connected with you as a friend from seeing your profile. Keep in mind that even though your posts may be limited to friends only, others can see the posts that you make on profiles that are not your own.
- Settings for past posts. If you are changing your privacy settings, enable the function to turn public posts that you make in the past to private or friends only.
- Block searches. Disable the ability for people to search for you via your email address and block search engines from searching your timeline.
- Untag yourself. Remove photo tags from friends’ photos when necessary.
- Limit Followers. Set your Instagram and Twitter profiles to private and enable the function that requires you to approve new followers.
- Ask your attorney. Discuss your social media usage with your social security disability lawyer. In some cases, he or she may recommend that you completely disable your accounts until your case is closed. Ask your social security disability lawyer to review your profiles for anything that could potentially damage your case, and follow his or her advice about managing social media.
Social media has many positive aspects, but if you are in the midst of a disability case, what you say and do can hurt you. Understand you are being scrutinized, and take precautions to prevent a misunderstanding from harming your legitimate disability claim.
