By the summer of 2015, staff who worked in the CPP disability program, including medical adjudicators, were given their new guidelines.
The briefing note provides a series of detailed examples of online searches that are considered to be over the line.
They include:
Looking up an online obituary notice for an application for CPP survivor benefits;
“Friending” a CPP disability claimant on Facebook to see if pictures provide evidence that the applicant can in fact work;
Looking up municipal property information to see if someone has lived in the country long enough to qualify for old age security benefits.
The briefing note says that using publicly available information like social media posts and even address listings could be considered “an invasion of privacy” and a violation of the Privacy Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.