Tweeting could harm your personal injury accident claim

Social networking is a phenomenon that looks set to stay, but it does have its pitfalls. Widespread reports in the national press have highlighted very adequately such problems with tales of riots at house parties attended by hordes of Facebookers after an innocent invitation was put on a profile page inviting 'Friends' for a drink or two. And now, the latest case of Facebook fraud, as part of a personal injury accident claim in the US, has caused quite a stir in the legal world as well.

It is with a modicum of chagrin that I own up to the fact that I do have a Facebook account. It was signed up to rather reluctantly during my last year as a mature student at university, as my younger cohorts all seemed to know what each other was doing just by the press of a key and I was a little out of the loop. I had resisted for months and so missed the MySpace days, but as my pals migrated to Facebook, they cajoled and implored, and so, as we graduated, I found myself tagged and entouraged and various people I once studied Post Modernist Poetry with threw sheep at me - virtually, of course.

However, I have always been wary of Facebook and I categorically don't do Twitter, but it's nice to occasionally find out that one of my friends has just scored 10 out of 10 on a banal Disney Movie quiz, or that a girl I didn't really get along with in Victorian Women's Writing would be a green Converse All-Star trainer - if she ever were to wake up and find herself a shoe. Above those profundities- I don't really get it.

My 20-year-old niece, a member of my group of 'friends', appears to post garbled messages to her "ladeez" about where they should meet to pass the evening hours virtually every ten minutes. So much so, that I seem to know her whereabouts and which special offer cocktail she will be imbibing from moment to moment on the dance floor that constitutes her life and in reality, I just don't want to know about the high-jinx of my brother's daughter, or of her 'palz' for that matter.

But, apart from that sort of pitfall, the latest brouhaha in the compensation claim world has surfaced after an over-eager insurance investigator fraudulently befriended a woman on Facebook, so that he could monitor her postings in an attempt to discover any information he could about her claimed-for accident injuries.

The New York Law Journal called it "improper access by subterfuge" and their article highlighted all sorts of electronic jiggery-pokery enlisted by agencies to gain information about plaintiffs' injuries through their emails and social networking sites. Of course surveillance has long been used to gain video evidence to reveal that workers who say they have been so badly injured they cannot work, are actually fit and healthy and donning lycra to go to the gym four times a week for strenuous aerobics sessions.

However, as the Philadelphia Bar Association Professional Guidance Committee noted, the notion that gaining access to the plaintiff's Facebook page was no different to videotaping a person's workout trips, was rejected on the grounds that if the videographer had posed as a plumber in order to gain access to the plaintiff's home with the intention of filming, then that would clearly be improper.

So, Twitterers beware, because unless you have set your parameters to restrict access to your tweets, every Tom, Dick or surveillance expert will know that you just watched Celebrity Wife Swap and that you now intend to purge yourself by going on a five mile run. And if your personal injury accident claim hinges on the fact that you can't walk further than from your couch to the kitchen, then you and your accident claim solicitor might have a tough time convincing a judge that your compensation claim is 'kosher'.

Can I claim?