The last time this cluster covered a link going somewhere it should not, the situation was an accident: when a link goes to the wrong person is about a mistyped number and what to do in the ninety seconds after you notice.
This is the opposite problem. Nothing has gone wrong. The customer is asking, on purpose, politely, and what they are asking for is entirely reasonable.
"Can you send the video to my brother? He does construction, I want him to look at it."
Or their business partner. Or the property manager. Or a second contractor they are getting a price from. Or, most often, a spouse who was at work.
You should usually say yes. What matters is how.
Why "just text it to them" is the wrong reflex
The instinct is to be helpful and fast: pull up the recording, generate a link, forward it, done in twenty seconds.
Three things go wrong with that, in ascending order of how much they will cost you.
You do not know who you sent it to. The customer gave you a name and a number. You have no way to confirm the number belongs to the person described, and you never will. That is not a reason to refuse — it is a reason to make the customer the sender rather than you.
You have created a record with no record. If somebody asks in fourteen months who had access to that footage, "the customer asked me to send it to their brother" is a memory, not an answer. Every share should leave a trace with a date on it.
You are handing out video of the inside of somebody's house. Not just the roof. Interior shots, anything the microphone caught in the driveway, whoever walked through frame. The customer is consenting on behalf of a household that may not have been asked.
The version that works
Four steps, and it takes about the same twenty seconds.
One: confirm it is the customer asking. If the request arrived by text from the number you already have, fine. If it arrived from an unfamiliar email signed with their name, call them. Impersonating a customer to obtain a recording of their property is not a sophisticated attack and it does not require a sophisticated defence, just a phone call.
Two: send the link to the customer, not the third party. This is the whole trick. You create the share link and send it to the person who hired you. They forward it. Now the decision to hand it on is theirs, made on purpose, and you have not sent a stranger anything.
That is not a dodge. It is an accurate reflection of who actually has standing to share a record of somebody's home.
Three: use a link that expires, and say when. Share links are time-limited, and telling the customer so is doing them a favour, not adding friction. "This works for the next few days, so have him look this week" is a normal sentence and it stops the link sitting in a message thread for two years.
Four: write down that you did it. Date, who asked, who you sent it to, why. A line in the job notes is enough. Chain of custody for field media is the longer argument for why that line matters.
The request that deserves a pause
Most of these are harmless. One shape is not, and it is worth recognising.
When the person being sent the video is in some way adverse to your customer — a landlord asking for video of a tenant's unit, one side of a property dispute asking for the other side's inspection, a family member who is not the owner — stop and work out who actually hired you and whose property it is. Your obligation runs to the customer of record. If the request is not coming from them, it goes through them.
That is not lawyering. It is the same rule as any other document you hold on somebody's behalf.
The related case, a request from somebody genuinely entitled to it whom you have never met, is covered in sharing with a third party safely.
What to say when the answer is no
Sometimes it is no, usually because the recording is past its retention window or the job belongs to a different customer. Say it plainly and say why.
"That one is past our retention period, so I no longer have it" is a complete and honest answer. So is "I can send it to you and you can pass it along, but I am not comfortable sending a video of your house to somebody I have not spoken to." Nobody has ever been offended by the second sentence. Several people have been reassured by it, because it is the same care they would want applied to their own footage.
The part that sells itself
Here is the thing worth noticing about this whole scenario: the customer asking you to forward the video is a customer who found the video useful. That is a good sign and you should treat the request as one.
Handling it well takes a minute and demonstrates something about how you keep records that no amount of saying "we are careful with your data" achieves. A customer who watches you create a deliberate, expiring link rather than dumping a file into a text thread has learned something about your company.
And it is worth telling them what will happen at their end, because most people have never received one of these. What happens to the video afterward is written for exactly that reader and is a reasonable thing to send alongside the link.
The access model — who can mint a share link, how long it lives, why there is no public URL — is on the security page.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.