Client Resources / Surveillance and Social Media
Assume you are being watched and assume your accounts have been read. Neither is a reason to stop living your life. Both are reasons to describe it accurately.
Reviewed August 2026If you have a serious injury or disability claim, it is reasonable to assume that at some point an investigator will watch you and that someone on the other side has looked at your social media. This is routine. It is not a sign that anyone thinks you are dishonest.
Knowing that changes very little about how you should live, and quite a lot about how you should describe your life. That distinction runs through everything below.
A licensed private investigator watches and films you from a public vantage point: outside your home, at a shopping centre, in a parking lot, at the gym, arriving at and leaving a medical appointment. It is usually done in short bursts over a few days, often timed around something the other side knows about, such as an assessment or a mediation.
The result is typically hours of footage from which a few minutes are selected.
Broadly, yes. Observing and filming someone in a public place is lawful, and investigators in Ontario are licensed and regulated. There are limits: trespassing onto your property, entering your home, or filming through windows into private space are different matters. If you believe something like that has happened, tell your lawyer immediately with dates and details.
Two things, and the difference is legally significant. It can be used as substantive evidence about what you are physically able to do, or it can be used to attack your credibility by contrasting the video with what you said under oath.
Surveillance rarely proves you are uninjured. It is used to prove you were inaccurate.
That is why the honest description of your limitations matters so much more than a stoic one. A person who has said they have good days and bad days, and that carrying groceries costs them the next morning, is not damaged by footage of them carrying groceries. A person who said they cannot lift anything is.
You have real protection here, and most clients do not know it. Surveillance is a document. It must be listed in the defendant's affidavit of documents even where privilege is claimed over the footage itself, and on request at discovery the defence must give particulars: the dates, times and locations, the nature and duration of what was recorded, and who conducted it. The obligation continues, so surveillance obtained after discovery has to be disclosed too.
Iannarella v Corbett, 2015 ONCA 110.If the defence wants to use the footage as substantive evidence rather than only to challenge your credibility, it has to produce the video itself well before trial. Springing undisclosed surveillance on a plaintiff at trial is the ambush the Court of Appeal put a stop to.
Surveillance is also frequently held back until after your examination for discovery, so that your evidence is locked in first. That is a legitimate tactic, and the answer to it is simply to be accurate at discovery.
Posts, photographs, videos, check-ins and comments are documents under the Rules of Civil Procedure. If they are relevant to something in issue in your case, such as your physical function, your activities, your social life or your mood, they can have to be listed and produced.
Ontario courts have consistently held that a private profile is not immune. Where a public profile shows relevant material, a court may infer that the private portion contains similar material, and production has been ordered.
Leduc v Roman, 2009 CanLII 6838 (ON SC).The picture is not one-sided, though. Courts have also refused to order wholesale production of an entire account, describing that as the digital equivalent of demanding every letter a person ever wrote, and have held that the onus is on the defence to show that relevant material actually exists rather than simply pointing at the existence of an account.
Stewart v Kempster, 2012 ONSC 7236; Smith v Jarnell, 2020 ONSC 6433.In practice that means production tends to be limited to genuinely relevant material, and your lawyer can and should resist a fishing expedition. It also means the safest assumption is that anything you post could end up in front of a judge.
This is the single most important sentence on this page. Once a claim is contemplated, deleting posts or photographs, deactivating an account, or scrubbing your history can do far more damage than whatever you were worried about.
Courts can order that content be preserved, and destroying relevant evidence can support an inference that it would have hurt your case. Worse, in practical terms, the deletion itself becomes the story at trial. A photograph of you at a wedding is explainable. A deleted photograph of you at a wedding is not.
Tightening your privacy settings going forward is a different thing and is fine. Removing content is not.
You do not control what friends and family post, and tagged photographs on someone else's account have been used in Ontario cases. Ask the people close to you not to tag you or post pictures of you while your claim is ongoing. Most will understand if you explain why.
Most clients, once they think about it, remember something that could look bad: a photograph on a boat, a hike, a birthday party, a day when they managed more than usual. Almost none of it is fatal.
Context is available. You can explain that you sat down for most of the day, that you paid for it for the rest of the week, that the photograph was taken before the accident, or that you were doing exactly what a physiotherapist told you to do. What you cannot do is explain it for the first time under cross-examination. Raise it with your lawyer now.
Not at the time. In a lawsuit the existence of surveillance and its particulars have to be disclosed, so you will learn of it during the litigation, though often not until after your discovery.
Your lawyer can obtain particulars, and where the defence intends to rely on the footage as substantive evidence it must be produced before trial. Where it is being kept for credibility purposes only, the footage itself may remain privileged.
No. Deactivating or deleting once a claim exists creates a much bigger problem than the content. Speak to your lawyer before changing anything beyond privacy settings.
Yes. Disability insurers use surveillance heavily, and insurers investigating property claims review social media as well. The disclosure rules described above apply once you are in a lawsuit.
Filming into private space raises very different issues from filming in public. If you suspect it has happened, note dates, times and any descriptions and tell your lawyer immediately.
Davidson Cahill Morrison LLP
If you think you have been followed, or there is something on your accounts you are worried about, the time to raise it is now. We act for clients in malpractice, injury, disability and insurance claims across Ontario.
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