The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is reporting that a 29-year-old woman from Quebec has lost her health benefits due to a set of pictures posted to her Facebook account. The woman, Nathalie Blanchard, suffers from a form of depression that is so severe that she was granted leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half. During this time, her insurance company, Manulife, continued to provide monthly sick-leave benefits. However, Manulife stopped sending these benefits when pictures of Ms. Blanchard were posted to her Facebook account showing Ms. Blanchard enjoying herself at a Chippendales bar, at the beach, and on her birthday. Manulife took these pictures as proof that Ms. Blanchard was no longer depressed.
Manulife has declined to comment, specifically, on Ms. Blanchard’s claim but they admit to using social networking sites to determine mental and physical states of policyholders. Ms. Blanchard’s attorney, Tom Levine, has stated “I don’t think for judging a mental state that Facebook is a very good tool.” Surely, a handful of pictures cannot accurately portray a person’s psychiatric state. However, a representative for the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association has said, “We can’t ignore [social networking sites], wherever the source of information is, we can’t ignore it.” Manulife’s use of social networking sites to determine the validity of health insurance claims seems to be a new take on the increasingly common practice of employers using such sites to make hiring decisions. Companies want information on the people they do business with and they see social networking sites as a viable way of obtaining it.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Ms. Blanchard’s situation is her claim that Manulife found these pictures despite the fact that she utilized Facebook’s privacy features. PCWORLD notes that even if you set your privacy settings to block all third-parties from accessing your information, friends of friends can still see what you post. As long as a Manulife representative could access the Facebook account of any of Ms. Blanchard’s friends, Manulife could still easily access her photos. It seems likely that one of Ms. Blanchard’s co-workers must have granted Manulife access to Ms. Blanchard’s pictures. Facebook’s privacy settings seem to provide little more than a false sense of security.
Ultimately, the safest option is simply not to post anything online that you would not want a boss or insurance agent to see. Nothing on the internet is private. This is a sentiment that has been shared by the President, who stated, “be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.” Sadly, this will likely be an exceedingly difficult lesson for the current generation to learn.
I was actually going to write about this subject, and I’ll probably at least cross reference it in my next post. I’d like to say that it’s hard to believe that an insurance company would do this, but it really isn’t that hard.
I must have missed when the doctors got together and defined depression as “totally incapable of having any fun.” Her doctors told her to go out and try to enjoy herself, for cryin’ out loud. This is like saying someone no longer has a problem with alcoholism because there are a few pictures of him without any drinks in his hands.