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ARTICLE · 30 MARCH 2016

In Personal Injury Disputes, Your Metadata Is Fair Game

Lerners LLP
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Anything you do or say may be used against you in the court of law. Increasingly, this includes what you may have shared online.

CanadaLitigation, Mediation & Arbitration
Maia Bent
Maia Bent
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Anything you do or say may be used against you in the court of law. Increasingly, this includes what you may have shared online.

Over the last few years, as sharing of personal information on social media has become more ubiquitous, many personal injury cases in Ontario are being decided on evidence gathered from plaintiffs' social media accounts, which provide 'metadata' creating a time and location stamp of a user's online activity. And it's all admissible as evidence in court.

Crucial to the admission of this kind of evidence is what social media now represents -- a public forum where users openly share details of their private lives and personal opinions. Once a comment, status update, tweet or photo is posted, it has gone public and it never really goes away, even after you hide or delete it.

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