Facebook, Confidentiality and Your Car Accident

According to the Digital Buzz blog, one in every thirteen people on earth signs into Facebook every day!  The site also reports that in just twenty minutes, over one million links are shared and almost three million messages are sent. Sharing details about our daily lives on social networking sites is great for gathering news and catching up with friends, family and colleagues. However, once you are involved in a car accident or have suffered any other type of personal injury, all of this sharing can potentially affect your lawsuit.

Don’t Share details on Facebook

After a serious accident involving personal injury or a car accident, the best course of action is to avoid discussing your condition, treatment or details of your accident online. This includes posting any images or photos relating to your accident or condition. The reason is that once you have posted this information, you have waived any claim to privilege that may have existed. This means that if the postings on Facebook (or any other social media site) are relevant to your lawsuit, they will likely need to be provided to the other side in the lawsuit.

Privileged Information

What is privileged information?  In general, once you’ve hired an Ontario injury lawyer for the purposes of listening to your case and offering advice, no one, not even the courts can require your lawyer to share the details of what you have discussed. The discussions you have with your lawyer are subject to lawyer-client privilege.

Who is Responsible for Keeping Information Privileged?

The only person capable of  breaking or waiving lawyer-client privilege is you! Therefore, you must always keep the conversations between yourself and your lawyer confidential. By sharing information or details through social networks such as Facebook, you voluntarily give up your right to keep that information privileged. This means these details and information, if relevant, will need to be produced in the lawsuit.

If you have questions about how to start a claim for compensation for personal injury, or would like to discuss the details of your car accident confidentially, contact one of our experienced personal injury lawyers in Ontario or call 1-800-563-6348 to speak to a lawyer for a free no-obligation consultation.