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A friend of mine worked as a private investigator for years after his dream of entering law enforcement didn't pan out. His job was mostly investigating insuran

by rietta 9y ago

A friend of mine worked as a private investigator for years after his dream of entering law enforcement didn't pan out. His job was mostly investigating insurance claims. He would actually drive his car and park near the home of the claimant for days and take photographs of any activity that would tend to support or disprove their disability claim. He's moved on to another career now, mostly because the career path in that field was not great. I'm not seeing how this is more invasive. I mean, people are making certain content public. Having a PI parked up the block in a car with tinted windows seems much more invasive and that is business as usual and legal for the insurance industry.

amelius 9y ago
Maybe they do both now? Also, I assume you can't PI every case. So social media may help as a pre-selection step for PI-work.
- JackFr 9y ago
  You PI chronic back pain disability claims. They are expensive to pay out and often real chronic back pain is not easily differentiated from fake chronic back pain by a physical. The diagnosis is made based on patient reported pain. The easiest way to confirm the diagnosis is observe if the claimant is behaving in a manner consistent with debilitating back pain.
will_brown 9y ago
I’m a lawyer and these tactics (for better or worse) are par for the course. Say the claimant in a civil suit makes a claim that due to their injury they can’t engage in normal daily activities leading to a loss in quality of life, example, I can’t lift up and hold my kids or I can’t take out the garbage. Better believe pictures of those things will pop up at a deposition, if the claimant has in fact done any of the above. I worked a worker’s compensation claim once, where a contractor claimed that due to a back injury he had basically become immobilized, sure enough he had Facebook posts that included zip lining - and was able to subpoena the waiver he signed declaring he had no injuries - and other posts like “drinking getting fucked up and dancing all night at the club” with pictures. So yeah basically people are doing the job for the insurance companies and lawyers that they used to have to hire and pay PIs to do.
username223 9y ago
> I'm not seeing how this is more invasive. It's not more invasive, but it's much cheaper. Allstate used to have to pay a rent-a-cop to park outside someone's house for every dubious claim. Now they can surveil millions of people almost for free. That's a huge difference.
spanktheuser 9y ago
It's not more invasive for the subject but it is more invasive for a population. The limitations imposed by the laborious nature of an investigation meant it could only be applied in cases where there was already a high degree of suspicion. Tools for scraping and classifying images from social media accounts can be economically deployed against every claim. It's logical that if you file a claim someone will scrape your data and store it for future business use.

by rietta 9y ago

amelius 9y ago

Maybe they do both now? Also, I assume you can't PI every case. So social media may help as a pre-selection step for PI-work.

JackFr 9y ago
You PI chronic back pain disability claims. They are expensive to pay out and often real chronic back pain is not easily differentiated from fake chronic back pain by a physical. The diagnosis is made based on patient reported pain. The easiest way to confirm the diagnosis is observe if the claimant is behaving in a manner consistent with debilitating back pain.

will_brown 9y ago

I’m a lawyer and these tactics (for better or worse) are par for the course. Say the claimant in a civil suit makes a claim that due to their injury they can’t engage in normal daily activities leading to a loss in quality of life, example, I can’t lift up and hold my kids or I can’t take out the garbage. Better believe pictures of those things will pop up at a deposition, if the claimant has in fact done any of the above. I worked a worker’s compensation claim once, where a contractor claimed that due to a back injury he had basically become immobilized, sure enough he had Facebook posts that included zip lining - and was able to subpoena the waiver he signed declaring he had no injuries - and other posts like “drinking getting fucked up and dancing all night at the club” with pictures. So yeah basically people are doing the job for the insurance companies and lawyers that they used to have to hire and pay PIs to do.

username223 9y ago

> I'm not seeing how this is more invasive. It's not more invasive, but it's much cheaper. Allstate used to have to pay a rent-a-cop to park outside someone's house for every dubious claim. Now they can surveil millions of people almost for free. That's a huge difference.

spanktheuser 9y ago

It's not more invasive for the subject but it is more invasive for a population. The limitations imposed by the laborious nature of an investigation meant it could only be applied in cases where there was already a high degree of suspicion. Tools for scraping and classifying images from social media accounts can be economically deployed against every claim. It's logical that if you file a claim someone will scrape your data and store it for future business use.