ICBC Law

If you are making an ICBC Personal Injury Claim and if you use social media such as Twitter ICBC is probably watching you.

You may be asking yourself ‘how can ICBC find my tweets if they’re not one of my followers?‘.  The answer is simple, ICBC monitors the phrase ‘ICBC’ and each time these letters are used the tweet comes to their attention whether they are one of your followers or not.  Want proof?  Here’s a recent exchange demonstrating this use in action.

An individual made an ICBC claim and posted the following on Twitter:

ICBC quickly responded to this individual as follows:

ICBC was not a follower of this indvidual and he was surprised that ICBC saw his tweet as can be seen from the following reply:

From a customer service standpoint this is probably good stratgy by ICBC.  If a customer is unhappy respond and see if you can help.  I have nothing critical to say about this.  However, from an injury claims perspective, people need to know that their social media use is being monitored perhaps by people they don’t want watching them.

I don’t write this post to scare you from using social media or even to discourage you from discussing your ICBC claim on-line.  You need to be aware, however, that your audience can be bigger then you expect.

Over the past few weeks I have posted a couple times about the potential uses that information on social media sites can be put to during personal injury litigation.  The first case involved the production of a hardrive to let the Defendant learn about the Plaintiff’s use of Facebook, the second case involved the contradiction of a Plaintiff’s testimony with photos from her Facebook account.

It is only fitting with these recent cases highlighting the use of social media in personal injury litigation that ICBC joins twitter.  I just stumbled on their account (right after the Canucks sealed their second straight against the Blues!) and as I write this post ICBC only has one ‘tweet’ which discusses BC’s new ‘enhanced’ driver’s licences.  To date ICBC is following no-one and has 13 followers.

I’m not sure who from ICBC is behind this account but hopefully they will designate an approachable person to run it and constructively use the service.  I would like to see ICBC use Twitter to enable them to better their product (auto insurance) and interact beneficially with their customer base.

As recent cases highlight, however, Social Media outlets can be used to spy on people involved in injury litigation and folks need to be careful with respect to the type of information they share on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Through twitter I have seen countless people discuss their experiences with ICBC, both good and bad and have read many details shared about people’s ICBC claims and the process involved in dealing with these.  ICBC will undoubtedly use Twitter in a similar fashion to compile and digest this information.

In any event, as one of the few BC Injury Lawyers on Twitter I’d like to welcome ICBC to the service and hope they use this technology productively to better serve British Columbians.