A YouTube star with 53 million followers, PewDiePie, had his endorsements dropped by both the video sharing platform and Disney on Tuesday following the star’s reportedly anti-Semitic posts.
It’s a high profile example of when the professional you do business with is revealed as unprofessional, in this case, to say the least.
Learn more about professional liability insurance here.
Professional liability holds a host of relatively new challenges for the insurance industry, not least of which is digital exposure.
Having spent most of his adult life preventing agents and brokers from getting sued for professional liability and preparing them for when they do, Chuck Brady, the Senior Vice President at
Aon Affinity is wary of online conduct risk.
Brady explained from an E&O standpoint, digital systems are helpful on one hand because they install transparent processes and documentation, but on the other hand it has potential for peril.
“Insurance agents in the digital age need to internally understand it for their own wellbeing, but also understand what kind of exposure their clients have along those lines,” Brady said.
“You have to talk to your employees about harassment in the use of technology, bullying, make fun of people, what will be the ramifications?”
Online defamation, posting inappropriate videos, sharing opinions using a work email clients may not espouse are all recently manifested professional liabilities.
Then there’s the cyber vulnerability of gatekeepers.
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Brokers facing digital exposure should worry about their people getting hacked, not just their behaviour, Brady said.
“Instead of actually going in and hacking, where they have to figure out the system, all they have to do is hack an individual and make them believe they’re the right people to send the money to,” Brady said.
“It’s something caught in betwixt and between a crime and a cyber policy but you need to make sure that it’s covered.”
Brady described hacking people as “social engineering” where duplicates of sites are created to fool the broker.
“It’s a claims trend that’s coming on strong,” Brady said.
Mitigating these risks means addressing bring your own device and remote working policies.
“Are they (your company or clients) going to allow their employees to use their devices for marketing, email, phone calls, or is going to be company phones? Can the owner of the agency search your phone?” Brady said.
Brady said at Aon, employees working remotely have strict rules around what wifi they’re allowed to use.
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