Apparently it is no longer just potential employers looking into your social networking accounts for incriminating evidence of your wild ways, now it’s also insurance companies.

CBC News is reporting that 29-year-old Nathalie Blanchard is currently on extended medical leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec for major depression.  During this time she has been receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife, but those ended this fall.  The reason?  She posted happy looking vacation pictures on Facebook.

Here are the details from the CBC:

When Blanchard called Manulife, the company said that “I’m available to work, because of Facebook,” she told CBC News this week.

She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.

Blanchard said she notified Manulife that she was taking a trip, and she’s shocked the company would investigate her in such a manner and interpret her photos that way.

“In the moment I’m happy, but before and after I have the same problems” as before, she said.

Blanchard said that on her doctor’s advice, she tried to have fun, including nights out at her local bar with friends and short getaways to sun destinations, as a way to forget her problems.

While we aren’t medical experts around here, making a medical decision based on how someone’s mental state is by how they appear in a few pictures seems a bit extreme to us.  Ms. Blanchard is being sent to a doctor for more tests and to see about getting her benefits reinstated.

However, it really isn’t so much Ms. Blanchard we are writing about here, but once again showing an example of how you need to be selective in what you put online about yourself.  if even insurance companies are going to start checking social networking profiles, which Manulife has admitted they do, are there things you want your insurance company seeing?  What if you post a picture of you holding a cigarette or cigar, even in jest?  They could cancel your policy under the belief you have taken up smoking, or raise your premiums based on you with holding information from them.

The cons of sharing personal photos on sites such as Facebook just seem to greatly outweigh the pros. Sure you can always mark your images as private, but in Ms. Blanchard’s case, her images were marked as private and yet when she called the insurance company they described the images to her shot-for-shot.

There are exactly 7 pictures online that show my face.  Four of those are from professional networking events, one is a profile picture for articles I write, one is me at the JFK Presidential museum and one is of me on vacation having lunch in a German brewpub in Boston.  That is it.  While I post pictures on sites such as Flickr, they are images of scenery or events but there are certainly no pictures of me doing anything that could harm my reputation or be taken as showing weak moral character and so on.  There is nothing wrong with taking those types of pictures, but do you really want them getting out to the world?

No matter if you set images to private, my opinion has always been that once you place an image anywhere on the Internet, you might as well suspect that it will get anywhere eventually.  I recently viewed the Facebook pictures of a friend of mine who is well respected in her profession, deals with clients and so on, and to be honest I couldn’t believe the pictures she chose to put on her account.  Drinking, hanging on people, compromising positions and so on, and all I could think of was “wait until her professional colleagues see these, and they will.”

By no means should I be construed as a prude, but I think there is a time and a place for those types of images, and putting them on social networks just never seems like the right idea to me, especially if you rely on insurance or are trying to get a job.

Wishing there was an easy way to convert your DVD collection to Blu-ray? Well, if you have Warner Brothers movies in your collection you can do it … for a price.

Following the Red2Blu promotion Warner Brothers ran a few months ago that allowed HD-DVD owners to swap their copies for Blu-ray, the company is now allowing consumers to do the same with their DVDs in the new DVD2Blu promotion.

As the name implies, consumers can go to the DVD2Blu website, choose from a list of over 50 movies that they have on DVD, mark the ones they wish to exchange (up to 25), pay for them and then mail in their DVD discs.  Prices for the Blu-rays range from $7.95 to $9.95, which sounds like a bargain, but is it really?  As the Consumerist points out, when they checked the prices of the movies against buying them off a site like Amazon, you are saving between $2 and $7 per movie, but the selection is rather lackluster.  For instance, where are the Harry Potter movies?  They are on both DVD and Blu-ray, yet they aren’t in this promotion.

There is also the illusion that just because something is on a Blu-ray disc it will have better picture quality, but with the improvements in DVD upconversion on so many players now, unless the source video was shot on HD, you are going to have a hard time telling a difference.

While the Red2Blu promotion made sense for those of us who had chosen HD-DVD, which eventually lost the format war, this offer doesn’t make quite as appealing.  Personally I won’t be partaking in it, but if you are desperate to switch to having everything you own on Blu-ray, go for it.

If you’ve ever been shopping on a site and been presented with the chance to join a “loyalty program”, you may have been looking at what the government is now investigating as a scam.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is looking into three firms — Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion — that engaged in post transaction marketing that caused consumers to receive charges to their credit cards that they never knew they had authorized.

The three firms worked with major online retailers to build pages that looked just like any other page from the retailer that offered consumers the chance to join a loyalty program.  The page would say that all it needed was for you to enter your email address, but in the fine print it said that by entering your email address you were authorizing them to charge your card a monthly fee.  The fees continued until the customers would find the charge on their cards, and in some cases people did not notice them for years.

All told, consumers were bilked for a reported $1.4 billion, with nearly half of that going to the retailers that partnered up with these firms.  Vertrue and Webloyalty say they have now changed the way people agree to the programs, while Affinion has not yet made any statements.

You can see the full list of sites at the bottom of this post of the companies involved with the scheme, and it is certainly a troubling roster.  This was not unknown mom-and-pop online stores, these were household names like Barnes & Noble, Time Life, Victoria’s Secret and more.

I have seen these offers over the years, and I honestly avoided them simply because I didn’t want more spam mail in my life.  There are some valuable lessons here though for all online shoppers as we enter what is expected to be the busiest ever holiday online shopping season:

• If something seems odd, it probably is.  Why would a retailer ask for your email address after you just went through an order process?  They already have it.
• Make sure to check your credit card bill every month, and make sure you know exactly what every charge is on that bill.
• Always make sure to read the fine print of any offers.

This story couldn’t be timed worse with the holiday shopping season upon us, but it also couldn’t be a greater shame that companies you should be able to trust allowed themselves to be involved in such a scheme.

Like some sort of mad science experiment, NBC (yes, the television network) has launched its own instant messenger/VoIP solution/streaming video/calendar/photo gallery/coffee dispenser program.  (okay, we’re fibbing about the coffee)

NBC Universal has released a new program called NBC Communicator that seems to be a catch all that will let you do just about anything you want while exploring video from its mother site.  (not from Hulu oddly, but instead from its own site)  As its core it looks like NBC has just thrown a few bells and whistles on top of a copy of MSN Messenger, and since that is the IM system it integrates with, we’re guessing we’re correct.

It seems a bit pointless to us, but obviously NBC feels it is going to be some sort of good idea for its social media presence.  We view it more as, “Hey, you can now use MSN with more annoyances like ads that will take up a decent amount of screen real estate inside the program.”

If you haven’t guessed yet, we are labeling this one as completely useless tripe that you really don’t need, and we’re not sure who really ever would.

Well, this isn’t the least bit surprising, but it seems three television networks trying to work together on one video site may not have been the best of ideas.

According to Mediaweek, things are not going swimmingly over at Hulu, which is jointly owned by the television networks ABC, Fox and NBC.  The short version of the story is that the advertising sales teams for the networks are locking horns with the team at the online company, and neither side is playing fairly.

It seems the network teams have never liked the fact that Hulu has its own ad people, and in turn, Hulu ad people keep breaking the company rules to keep ad slots from going to the network people.  Hulu will promise better performance than the network guys will, and while they aren’t supposed to promise which shows or networks an advertisers ads will appear with, they keep doing just that.  Supposedly it is all of this in-fighting that has kept CBS from putting its shows on the popular site.

So, why should this concern you, the common viewer?  Well, this bickering between the two ad teams is leading to confusion in the marketplace, and the less ads on Hulu, the more likely it is the site will finally go to some form of subscription basis.  The article also says that Hulu’s ad revenue is not keeping pace with its growth, another marker against the site continuing to be free.  Add in the fact that Comcast is looking to buy NBC, and this could mean the network would leave the site, and things aren’t exactly looking up for Hulu at the moment.

In general it seems that the attitude towards free streaming television sites is changing, and this could be a very bad thing for the consumer.  Being able to watch television on the Internet has become the staple of viewing for many people, some going as far as to give up normal television in their homes, so this could be a major blow to many people.  Sadly it doesn’t look like something the consumer can do much to fix, but it is better to be fore warned.

Even if you don’t care to get heavily involved with social networking, have you thought about what happens if someone with your same name is?

We’ve written before about how employers can be checking your Facebook account before they hire you, but don’t think just because you don’t have a Facebook that you are safe.  Have you thought about how someone with the exact same name may be out there on social networks posting information that would shine an unfavorable light on you even though it isn’t you?

Lets say an employer goes to check on potential hire Englebert Humperdink, and when they see just one person with that name on a social network, they just assume its you.  Well this other Englebert has information about taking illegal drugs, talks about partying and so on, this could end up reflecting poorly on you.

Now, true, there are other sign posts that would hopefully tell the person it isn’t you, but you are counting on them being detail orientated, something most people are not.  Wouldn’t it be better for you to claim the profile for your name even if you never put a thing on the account?

Of course this isn’t going to work for people with names like John Smith, but if your name is the least bit unique it is something you should think heavily about just to protect yourself.

With services like Namechk you can enter your name as you would want it to appear, so lets say “engleberthumperdink” and the service will check 132 of the most popular social sites in one shot letting you know where the name has been taken, or if it is still available.  If it shows up red on too many sites, meaning it has been taken, you may want to think of another version of the username, but if its green, waste no time and go and grab them!

Essentially you have to think of this as the 21st century version of the land grab; if you don’t do it, someone else will.

Don’t you wish you could quickly compare prices you find in brick and mortar stores with the going price online right there on the spot? Thanks to Retrevo this is now easier than ever.

We’ve all been in that spot where we are in a retail store and we think we find a bargain, but in the back of our head we start wondering what the reviews are like online, what are the prices on the Internet and so on. Well, thanks to price comparison site Retrevo, all of that information is now just a text message or Tweet away.

By simply sending a text message to the company shortcode, you receive a text message back explaining the going price online and if they recommend you buy it. The example the company provided was you send a request to shortcode 41411 with the following: “retrevoq Canon 500D” (minus the quote marks) and this is what I got back:

Canon 500D: Strong Buy if you want high end. Fair Price: $854. Range: $727 – $1043. http://bit.ly/1wSds2

By clicking on the link in the text I was taken to the corresponding page on the the Retrevo Web site with more in-depth information about the product.

If you prefer to use Twitter, you can get the same info by either sending them a public message or a direct message.  So if you sent them something like “@retrevoq Canon 500D” and you would receive the same information I received in the text message.

I was impressed with the speed of the reply text message, the formatting and the included information. My only complaint would be that the prices listed by Retrevo in general do not include Amazon’s price, but they do included about a dozen other sites, so you still are receiving a good range of choices.

There has been a need for a service like this for a long time, and seeing as it is free, you have nothing to lose. This is the perfect tool to help you with your shopping this coming Black Friday for those bargains you wander into by accident.

With the holiday shopping season upon us, it can be tempting to try to find a bargain for that big ticket item your child asked for, but when it comes to Xbox 360′s this year, buyer beware.

Recently Microsoft went through and banned Xbox 360′s that had been modified to play pirated games from being able to use the Xbox Live service. Reports indicate that anywhere from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Xbox 360′s are now unable from ever logging into Xbox Live ever again, even if you create a whole new account for the online gaming service.

The affected units had all been modified in some way by after market hardware chips and software that would allow them to play modified games, pirated games and more hacks. All of these activities violate the Xbox Live terms of service, so hence the banning by Microsoft.

According to a story on Yahoo, those banned units are now showing up on sites such as eBay and Craig’s List for sale in droves. While some sellers are being upfront about the status of their units, while others are not being so forthcoming. While these units will still play offline games, and even pirated games if you so choose, they will never again be able to log in to Xbox Live.

While some of these units may be a tempting purchase for the holidays, it is definitely “buyer beware” right now if you are looking to purchase a used Xbox 360.

It seems that changing your status message on Facebook is useful for a lot more than just killing time.

On Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., Rodney Bradford posted a Facebook status update from his father’s home in the Harlem section of New York City.  He was wondering where his pancakes were, and he left it at that.

According to The New York Times blog, the next day Mr. Bradford was arrested on suspicion of being involved in an armed mugging.  Mr. Bradford was already facing charges in a minor incident, but due to that, combined with the new charges, he could have been facing very serious sentencing.

There was one small problem with the case: the mugging happened at approximately 11:49 AM on Oct. 17th … when Mr. Bradford was updating his Facebook status.

After a court order to verify the location of where the status update was made from, and Facebook verified it came from the area Mr. Bradford claimed to be in.  While his defense lawyer Robert Reuland admitted that anyone that knew Mr. Bradford’s login information could have been the one to enter the status message, but it seemed unlikely considering the location and timing of the update.

The interesting portion of this article was the following passage, and what prompted me to bring this up on the site:

“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”

While we’re not saying you should update your social status on various networks on a continual basis — you know, “just in case” — it does bring up an interesting future defense for people involved in criminal cases.  However, Mr. Reuland’s comment of how it seemed unlikely that someone else could have done this for Mr. Bradford, he also just sank the defense for anyone else in the future.  That will always be the question from now on, but I somehow doubt that this will be the last time we see this come up.

Tired of others dictating to you what your BlackBerry screens, icons, sounds and so on should be? Why not give the BlackBerry Theme Studio a whirl?

Since Research In Motion (RIM) introduced themes into its popular BlackBerry phones, you have been either stuck with the pre-loaded ones, a small selection of free ones you can download or paying for others you could find on some sites.  You could some times change the home image, but it always took some research to figure out what size the image needed to be.  All of this has now been simplified thanks to the new BlackBerry Theme Studio from RIM.

With this new application you can edit the following features of your phone:

• Home screen and backgrounds
• Icons and menus
• Animations and screen transitions
• Sound effects and ringtones

If you want to get real fancy, you can use programs like Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to create more detailed graphics.  If you don’t feel like doing everything yourself, you can also use the built-in templating system that will help you get along in the process.

While not an Earth shatteringly important announcement for the BlackBerry, it certainly is a welcome one for fans of the popular smartphones.

[Thanks to Jo from Jo's Cafe for the tip]