A client with a torn rotator cuff spent an afternoon at a Temecula wine festival about four months after her crash. She stood for maybe twenty minutes, held a glass in her good hand, and posed for one photo before her husband drove her home. She spent the next two days flat on her back. The defense never mentioned those two days. Attorney Dustin watched them project that single photograph during mediation and argue it proved she was living normally. The picture was real. The story attached to it was not, and undoing that took an expert, medical records, and a deposition that should never have been necessary.
Can the insurance company legally look at my social media?
Yes. Anything publicly visible on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, or a public Strava profile can be viewed, screenshotted, and saved by an adjuster or defense investigator without notice to you and without permission. There is no expectation of privacy in something you published to the internet.
Claims departments have made this routine. Reviewing a claimant’s public profiles is often one of the first steps taken on a bodily injury file, sometimes within days of the claim being reported and long before anyone has requested a single medical record.
Why setting your account to private is not the protection you think it is
Private posts are still discoverable in litigation. California’s discovery statute, Code of Civil Procedure section 2017.010, allows discovery of any non-privileged matter relevant to the subject matter of the case, and once you place your physical condition at issue by filing an injury claim, your own descriptions of your activities become relevant.
The mechanics have a wrinkle worth understanding. The federal Stored Communications Act generally prevents the defense from subpoenaing your content directly from Meta or Google, so they cannot go around you. What they do instead is serve requests demanding that you produce it, which means you may end up handing over the very posts you assumed were shielded.
Should I delete my old posts?
No. Deleting content after an accident, once a claim exists or litigation is reasonably anticipated, creates a far worse problem than any photo you were worried about.
California does not recognize a separate lawsuit for destroying evidence, a point settled in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center v. Superior Court in 1998, but the remedies that do exist are punishing. Courts can impose discovery sanctions, and California Civil Jury Instruction 204 permits a jury to be told that if a party willfully suppressed evidence, it may conclude that evidence was unfavorable to them. Given the choice, most defense attorneys would rather have the deletion than the photograph. Deactivation and archiving carry the same risk. The right move is to stop posting, not to erase.
What kinds of posts actually damage cases?
The harmful ones are rarely dramatic. It is almost never someone claiming a back injury filmed deadlifting. It is context collapse, where a true image loses everything that made it make sense.
Recurring examples from real files include a photograph taken before the crash but posted afterward, so the timestamp suggests recent activity. A friend tagging you at a birthday dinner you left after thirty minutes. A check-in at a gym you visited for supervised physical therapy. A hiking app auto-sharing a one mile walk your doctor prescribed. A caption written to sound upbeat for family, saying you are feeling great, later read aloud at your deposition. Fundraiser pages describing your condition in language that does not match your medical records.
Metadata compounds it. Photos carry timestamps and sometimes location data, and defense investigators build timelines from them and set those timelines beside your treatment dates.
Are private investigators allowed to follow me?
Yes, within limits. Surveillance conducted in public places is legal because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on a sidewalk, in a parking lot, or in your front yard visible from the street. Investigators are hired regularly in cases involving significant claimed limitations.
The boundaries are real. California Penal Code section 632 makes recording confidential communications without the consent of all parties a crime, and section 647 addresses recording into private areas such as through the windows of a home. Investigators who cross those lines create serious problems for the defense.
In California, surveillance footage is generally discoverable. The state Supreme Court addressed this in Suezaki v. Superior Court back in 1962, holding that surveillance films are not automatically protected as attorney work product. Defense counsel frequently tries to hold the video until after your deposition so they can lock in your testimony first, which is precisely why your description of your limitations needs to be accurate rather than overstated.
What should I do with my accounts while the case is pending?
Tighten the settings and go quiet. Set every profile to the most restrictive privacy option available, turn off location sharing and automatic activity posts from fitness and running apps, and decline friend or follow requests from people you do not personally know.
Ask family and friends not to tag you or post photos of you, since their accounts are not covered by your settings. Say nothing about the accident, your treatment, your attorney, or your case anywhere online, including group chats and comment sections. Assume every word reaches the adjuster.
What Attorney Dustin tells every client at the first meeting
Your case is worth what you can prove about how the injury changed your daily life. Social media is a highlight reel by design, and a highlight reel is the worst possible evidence of a person’s worst months. Nobody posts the night they could not sleep or the appointment where they cried in the parking lot.
Insurers count on the gap between what you post and what you live. Keeping your accounts locked down, leaving old content untouched, and speaking accurately about your limitations protects the claim. If an investigator has contacted you or you are unsure whether something you posted creates a problem, have Attorney Dustin review it before the defense does.
