I have written before about insurance company lawyers using social media, photos, and smart phone data against injured people. Attorney Dale Swope on page 18 of the January/February issue of the “Journal of the Florida Justice Association” clearly addresses these issues in the article “Brave New World”. I quote him as follows:
“Everybody who practices on the plaintiff’s side of personal injury knows that technology is rapidly changing everything about these cases. The engine truly driving the train is probably the ubiquitous Smartphone that universally puts hi-def cameras and videos and all forms of indelible electronic communication a thumbswipe away.
Our clients (and everybody else around them) are photographing everything they do and see in their life, and then tweeting and snapchatting an unfiltered stream of thoughts, observations and opinions on everything, basically during every waking moment.
These media, along with “old school” social connectors like Facebook are building a big permanent data record that cannot be ignored in injury cases either for the Plaintiff or the defense, Facebook recently announced it has 1.23 billion users, and would be the third-largest country in the world if it were one - so that should give you some idea of how much data is being stored up in the cloud.
And it is worth remembering the case where the lawyer got suspended from the practice (of law) just for telling his client to “clean up his Facebook page”. (citation omitted)
In addition to the smartphone’s indelible electronic ink, add the seamless web of surveillance cams that are basically everywhere. Then add the that GPS data that our phone and cars are recording to tell anyone interested where we have been, how long we were there, and how fast we were moving in between. Very quickly you have described a world very different from the one we think we live in - a world that would have gotten George Orwell laughed our of town if he had tried to predict it.”
