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Dead? Hope You Left Someone Your Passwords
A reader writes "Looks like if you die, Yahoo won't grant access to family members. I know I've enjoyed reading my grandfather's letters from WWII, this could be a huge loss of history if other ISP's have the same policy." MJK points out that Slashdot has explored the notion of what happens to your data after you die.
They should try the password 'b00bi3s'
Anything of mine worth reading is already +5 Funny.
someone contact the BSD family and tell them to leave a post it note of their passwords!
My family members are welcome to keep all the emails I've sent them. But my personal mail? That'd incriminate way too many people still living...
don't keep anything you want to pass on stored on Yahoo! Next problem?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I know there is a program out there called Dead Man's Switch which will delete files and send mail for you after you die...
yet another reason to make your passwords the names of your children!
2 1337 4 u!
This is slashdot, you can trust us.
Would you really want your parents reading all of your email? I wouldn't...
If they want their correspondance with him, then they should have saved their copies of his emails!
Just leave your paswords in your will, update it everytime you start to look in the dying kind of mood.
Of that joke about dying and having you parents find you porn collection.
I'm not sure I would want my parents reading my email, byt I probably wouldn't care if I was dead.
I can't wait for my kids to read all my beastiality spam!
i can't imagine the shame my family would experience if i were remembered by some of my slashdot comments
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Do you think they'll read your text files to see what you wrote?
Do you think they'll look in your temporary internet files directory and see your browsing habits?
God spoke to me.
My data is my data, and unless I stated otherwise in my will, it dies with me.
Also, if my relatives would have something to see in my email, I would let them read it.
After all the reason you use the yahoo mail is privacy.
Why should my privacy die with me ? (sounds funny, though)
Do like me and just change your password to "password"...
Problem solved.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Store your passwords on a durable medium and keep them in a safe at the bank. Only problem is when you have to change your password.
Or, use the average joe method: post-it on the backside of a keyboard.
I think keeping the contents private is prudent.
It is up to you to archive your emails and other e-stuff in a a spot that it can be found, if indeed you really want it found after you are "gone".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
When I die, I wouldn't want any one to find my pr0n. Someone needs to create encrypted mpeg/divx.
Or maybe I should request that I be buried with it to take to the afterlife. "Please bury me with the harddrive with the folder name 'Stuff'".
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
A lot of times it's fairly obvious, especially for family memebers - defaults are "What is your Mother's maiden name?" "What was your first pet called?" "What street did you grow up on?"
A sibling or parent should know any of those - which is why you should always make up your own, by the way
score 1 for terrorists using yahoo mail
. . . that you can read today's Email in 60 years? I doubt it very much. This is just the way things are going, hardly any letters are written by hand and even the CDs and inkjet printouts last that long.
Cheers, Nostrada
Plus think of the flaming possibilities. You could instruct your surviving loved ones to flame as much as you want, knowing full well no one can touch you in return (unless you believe you are experiencing literal flaming after death, but that's just the risk flamers take).
Seriously, put it in your will if it's important enough.
Related Story
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I can see it now, my mother saying "Wow. I didn't know my son had business partners in Nigeria." I know when I die, I don't want my family reading all the "Young sluts get fucked in the ass and drink cum while sucking a midget's dick!" emails that fill up my inbox. Believe me, there is nothing of value in my emails.
Leave the accounts and passwords in your will. Seal them in a saftey deposit box.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Sympathize meaning couldn't care less.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
I remember a while back when a kid supposidly commited suicide over Everquest, and SOE refused to give his family access to his account to see why he killed himself. I can understand why Yahoo and SOE wouldn't do something like this, it's a security risk afterall. I think access should be given on a case-by-case scenario.
Grandma: Oh my god, how many emails about viagra did he have?
Ohhh, I better contact this poor Mr. Mbutu and see if I can help him out. I didn't realize pop had friends in Nigeria.
Look at all these money making schemes? How come I never saw any of this money?
Oh dear, I had no idea pop was into asian porn...
My my, it looks like pop was corresponding with someone about Vicodin.
Perhaps its better he died...
My experience has been that important accounts (e.g. webmail services, bank account numbers, etc) are shared between spouses. A lot of passwords are already on the auto-fill on the home computer too. This is a good safeguard against losing data suddenly (e.g. accidents).
In case of grandma's and grandpa's... they would often ask others to check their emails for them. Their situation would be more gradual, and stuff can be backed up regularly.
Also, the electronic medium has been relatively new (may be five years since it became mainstream). New safeguards will develop as time progresses. So, in essence, no big deal...
S
This sounds like a time when lawyers would be useful. A subpeona or court order should obtain the desired results, although it's pretty bad that family members would have to go through this hassle. Still, if it was one of my family members, it would be worth it to not lose that precious data. --Jacksonai
Like Sweepstakes? Try out my service @ http://www.yourpowersweeps.com -- Free 21 day trial, no cc needed.
If it was private when I am alive, it is still private after I am dead. I might say things to a sister about my dad, that I wouldn't necessarily want him to read.
I write stuff to a girlfriend I sure the hell wouldn't want my mother reading, even after I am dead.
If I wanted them to read it, I would have cc'd them. Everyone here would sure bitch if they gave a copy of your email to your mom while you were alive, why is it OK when you are dead? I don't get the logic.
I could see them resending all my emails to everyone they originally were addressed to, if the recipients had deleted them and wanted them back, but that is as far as I would go.
- I like pudding.
I guess he should have used a blog...if he really wanted his family to see his personal email. However, it probably was PERSONAL email. I wouldn't want my family to see that either.
Call that the "cache directory."
All my important passwords (along with other information such as bank account numbers etc) are in a file I encrypt with my wife's public key. If we both exit together, well, hmm. Gone forever.
A lot of times it's fairly obvious, especially for family memebers - defaults are "What is your Mother's maiden name?" "What was your first pet called?" "What street did you grow up on?"
A sibling or parent should know any of those - which is why you should always make up your own, by the way.
The poster's grandfather wrote his letters during WWII over email? I wonder who his ISP was.
...to all the spam I get.
Yahoo hates America, our troops, etc. Bunch of commies and all that.
I think not, and for the same reasons I set my Firefox cache & history to ZERO. ;)
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
The letters(e-mail) are the personal property of the deceased. A court could reasonably issue an order telling yahoo to turn over "personal effects" unless the deceased person specifically requested them not to.
Do privacy rights still apply? Let us say that you die in a car accident, should your medical records and all of your personal information be available to family members? Can this not, at some point be abused by providing fake information in order to gain access to an account? If I want my family members to have access to something, then I will either tell them now, or have that data in my will or other document to be distributed by my legal representative upon my death.
If this family wants to keep the messages, then they should save them from their side of the chain. I think Yahoo is in the right in that they should not be made to give out password to those that do not control the account. They would have to deal with the expense of handling a lot of requests if even a single exception was acknowledged.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
...once. The thought of my family reading my mail after I die is too horrible for words.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I expect my bank, doctor, and ISP to not give my property to someone else without either 1) my permission or 2) a court order.
If I die, in order to get my money, into my safe deposit box, or access my e-mails, my estate simply needs to go get a court order.
Why is this news? It is standard practice when anyone has property of a deceased person.... the estate has to decide WHO gets what. Just because you are the relatives, doesn't mean you are THE relative that should get the access. Many families find a relatives possessions stolen by "other family members" before the estate can secure the property and decide who is actually entitled to get what.... happened at my Great-Grandmother's house when she died. Greedy bastards. We had to leave a guard at my Grandmother's house while protecting the contents while the rest of the family went to the funeral a few years ago.
Slashdot hates my connection today - double posted this by accident. Sorry!
i have always known that when i pass on that no one would be able to access my data.
so in order to secure that...i've left a note detailing my passwords and accts locked in a safe within my home.
it's not like i have anything secret to hide.
and the lord knows my email would be a great cure for insomnia but still i feel it necessary to give my family the ability to log me off of all apps and spam lists.
Is it 5:30 yet?
Look for this "Premium" service offering to be in your inbox by the end of the week.
"Our condolensces(tm)"
-Hotmail Staff
If you think
Most major portals have the ability to recover a forgotten password by putting in a maiden name, or sending the password to the email they signed up with. Now assuming this person had another email acct they signed up with, they could have chosen the lost password feature and seiezed his other email to then get into Yahoo.
I used to take tech support phone calls for an ISP, and a father called in wanting the password to his daughter's email account because she died in a car accident. He verified the home address, phone number, and social security number of his daughter so I reset the password for him. Whether it's legally right or not I would not want that on my conscious that I denied that request to a father. He just lost someone he loved so much, I wasn't about to slap him in the face with some bullshit policy. I'm a father too and I understand.
You know, sure it would be nice to know that the people I care about etc, have access to whatever it is they want to have, after I die. But really, in the end, I really don't care. I'm dead. In fact it tickles me to know that after I die, I can still cause problems.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
The password to the shield is....1 2 3 4 5
"Oh look, Grandfather apparently needed a larger penis."
I know there must be a *nix variant of this kind of program (a simple cron job perhaps?) that can act as a .
I guess I'm simultaneously surprised and cynical that someone going into a hostile environment like Iraq didn't prepare for this possibility. My condolences for his family.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
I don't really think I want my children reading my exploits on the web as a 14 year old virgin looking for older men who have had sex change operations. Thanks anyway.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
So the Beast (Gummint) can get access to your mail, but your family can't. Surely this is another sign of the End Times.
Best regards.
I have a nick here that was associated with a now dead email address. I lost the password (I know--my bad), and tried to get it from Slashdot. But since the original email address is gone, they won't send me the password, or allow me to reset it.
/.
Therefore, I can't use that nick any more. Thanks
I just access all my yahoo accounts through POP3. So as long as they don't reformat the computer, the passwords are atored there. Now I want to know what Gmail's policy on this is, because with the information on there, they had better never give my password to anyone, not even George W. Bush.
i had fully planned on leaving a nice system behind so people could read my mail and find all my files. now, i am fully aware that no one would do it, or read any of it, or save any of it, but i'm dead, what would i care? and besides, i'm too lazy. it would never happen. but i can pretend.
Did the soldier leave any indication that he wanted his private correspondence to be kept for historical reasons? He doesn't have a duty to history any more than he had a duty to donate his organs; if he wanted his email read by his family, well, that's what wills are for.
I'm glad Yahoo's not releasing his passwords - call it a win for privacy advocates.
this could be a huge loss of history if other ISP's have the same policy
Yahoo's an ISP?
In the event of my death, these are my passwords in plaintext. I trust the Slashdot community to maintain confidentiality until I depart this life and my soul goes straight to hell^w^w^w^w ascends to heaven. Here they come:-
Hotmail:- wn4tpr0n4u
Yahoo:- x10CAM4me
Geocities:- 4n0TH4pOpuP
PayPal:- pp47isTEHsuX0r5
Of course, if anyone asks for the account names to go with them, I'll know you're up to something.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
That's how I make a living...I kill people, delete their files and send mail in their name. Are you saying I'm going to be laid off too?
Let's hope the daughter was actually dead, and not simply dating a black man/pregnant/or just simply avoiding her racist/shotgun wielding/asshole of a father. (If it even was her father)
You had no right to do what you did. If you were my employee I would have fired you. Bullshit poilcy or not.
would be nice surpise for the widow to find the dead husband was having an affair, and useing his yahoo e-mail because it was a secret...
the dead have the right to privacy too
Most of us have worked hard to move everything we do online. I use the net to manage all of my money, via banks, or trading. I don't worry so much about death, but what if I was in a simple car accident? Who is going to manage my options closing that month? Or is going to keep up on my bills. I don't want to recover only to find out my credit score is in the dumbs, and I lost a bunch of money cause I couldn't close out of trades.
I have actually been in process recently of setting up a way to have my gf or parents access my accounts incase of disability or something. As insecure as it might sound.
Did he provide a copy of the death certificate? How do you know who it was or wasn't?
What you did was wrong, and if it wasn't illegal, it should be.
If you didn't want it on your concience, you should've passed the call up the chain of command to someone with more integrity.
...I run my own mail server. After having had the experiences of Hotmail eating my e-mail a few years back and my original ISP (Corecomm can go eat a dick) giving my user ID and e-mail address to someone else when they ate Stratos.net (this used to be a good ISP until Corecomm fucked it up), I decided that this would never happen again. I now host my own e-mail on my own server. The freedom of doing this yourself is cool as hell. I have over a terabyte of space I can use to store my mail. This is what needs to happen for everyone in the US. Home appliances that host basic mail and web space that is only used between family and friends. This would cut down on viruses, and data loss. The only problem is... making it "idiot proof". After all, you don't put all of your important papers in someone else's care, do you?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I don't know whether to say "well, it's OK if my parents read my mail after I'm dead ... but only if it's digitally signed!" or "In Korea, giving your passwords to your loved ones in case you die is only for old people."
What to do, what to do?
a huge loss of history if other ISP's have the same policy
Just think, decades from now your offspring can sample your vintage spam.
It seems to me that the question at hand isn't what to do with the data, but whether the data belongs to the deceased's estate or to the ISP. I took a look at the old thread referenced, and no one seems to mention that.
Realistically, who owns my email? Obviously the courts seem to think that the employer owns my email at work. If I pay my local ISP, I should be able to make a strong case that *I* own the data, but that's not been challenged in court. For Yahoo, they don't pay me, and I don't pay them. So it's kind of like a public commons, which both everyone and no one own. Or maybe the Yahoo stock holders own his email?
I bequeath 200 gigs of tentacle-rape hentai.
I should be okay, my passwords are on a Post-It attached to my monitor.
Your personal data is automatically protected by copyright upon creation (at least in U.S.). Couldn't you put in your will that the copyright of your data is to be transfered to a family member upon your death? Then that family member, being the legal copyright holder of the data, should be able to gain access to it. Or you could just GPL all of your personal data :)
I have seen the following in the banking world:
Father of a twenty-two year-old woman calls the bank (friendly small-town bank...) and tells them his daughter has died, and then provides all the id, etc. They let him transfer her entire account balance to his.
Turns out the woman had just moved out, against his wishes, and that he was trying to "convince" her to move back in and continue cleaning house, doing laundry, etc.
Should have seen the look on the branch manager's face when she walked in to make a withdrawal...
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
When my best friend died in a tragic hiking accident, I spent about 30 hours trying to hack his hotmail account for his family- after they found out that Hotmail was not going to give it up for us. I never did get in.
I've been heavily into the MMORPG scene over the last few years, and some of my closest friends are folks that I don't have any other contact with. If one of them was to get hit by a bus, I'd never know what happened. That would be odd. I suppose that from my side of the monitor it would be exactly the same as if they had suddenly quit playing the game and never contacted me again. That's an odd concept.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
"In case I hit the bucket, release my inbox to my family after ____ years".
I've got a bunch of names and social security numbers, and your customer's email, if not profitable for me, should at least be amusing.
Oh, and if I could have your direct extension too, that would be nice.
In short, you exposed all the users of your ISP to fraud by allowing anyone who called you with a sob story and some previously compramised data account access they shouldn't have. But hey, as long as your CONSCIENCE feels good....
paintball
My wife knows all of my passwords. Figure if I can trust her not to fool around with the cute guy in her office, I can trust her not to look at my email.
She's a great wife too! Such a hard worker. Always working really late!
There's a sealed envelope in the safe which has the passwords to everything. It's right under the copies of my will, and my bank account numbers.
Now if I can just remember the combination...
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Sure.. go ahead, my relatives can have all my spam after I'm dead!
(sorry
Make It Secret . Free JavaScript implementation of AES for your browser
I'm actually glad to see Yahoo stick by their privacy policy here. I think a lot of people would be quick to jump the gun and say "we should make an exception" because of all the emotions involved with the Iraq war, a soldier being killed serving his country, patriotism, et cetera.
First off, most soldiers who go to Iraq leave behind wills, letters , etc. that are to be opened in the unfortunate event that they don't make it back home. If you really want your family to have access to these kinds of things, leave your password in these documents. What if I died and didn't want my family perusing through my e-mail? Once you've passed away, you can't give consent OR deny requests. It shouldn't be assumed that everyone has no problem with their family having access to all of their stuff. I agree that reading a grandfather's letters from WWII is probably quite enjoyable and insightful, but he made a conscious decision to leave those behind. In this situation, we don't truly know what the soldier wanted. It's an easy problem to avoid. If you want people to have access, leave the passwords behind. Due to the sad nature of the topic, I will try to avoid the obvious sort of "Tell them to look under his keyboard" jokes.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I don't think I really want my emails to be available to my next-of-kin after death; if it were, then people wouldn't be willing to email me things that they didn't want my next-of-kin to see. Of course, there's some privacy risk from the fact that my email is all unencrypted on my hard drive.
In any case, do you really want someone saying at your funeral that "He was such a promising young man... too bad all his data was lost upon his death"?
If he wanted his family to see what was in his account, he'd have given them his password.
Of course, I don't give my passwords out to anyone, even family. I wonder if one could set up a "Dead Man's" switch that automatically changed your account passwords to pre-defined ones you've given to your family to use in the event of your death.
Yes, she really is great. Every night she comes over and we have awesome sex. When we're done, we read your email.
I just hope to god someone has the good sense to erase my laptop when I die. Just don't hand it to my loved ones for them to browse. ....or something like that.
-Styopa
Just store your pr0n on an encrypted filesystem.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They die. Encrypted, personal and not for others, whether I die or not. Quite frankly, those I know and love should have more than enough without my data. And for the great posterity, I imagine that either a) There's more than enough people who didn't keep their data private or b) I've gotten important enough to actually set up some sort of dead man's switch in my will.
It is not like this is just online. Many places in real life would also suddenly find me "missing", yet never actually go as far as to figure out what happened. Both on- and offline, those that are important enough to know would know. That'll do.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Because, well, I will be dead. But just in case, I left a provision to put aside $50 so that family members could pay for a psychic to ask me for anything that I may have forgotten to write down somewhere.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Passwords should be stored somewhere for just such events, perhaps in a safety deposit box, or written in a book that's very well hidden and instructions to find it made available after death. In any case, it's a personal responsiblity thing, although I sympathize with the family member on both losing the family member ( a little more important I'd think) and losing the historical family documents. Perhaps there is a way to an exception here, but there won't be any quick and easy non-legal method, of that you can be sure
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The signature key is never, ever escrowed. There is no need for anyone else to ever recover your key in order to sign documents.
The beauty is that you can now recover the secret messages for reading if everybody agrees, and the fidelity of the system stays intact.
Of course, none of this works to recover your yahoo mail or online accounts. Maybe someday PKI technology will make its way into a system that will get certificates into end-user hands. But somehow I doubt it.
This actually happened to our family this past August. My 19 year-old sister died in a car accident. I think my mother wanted access to her email to spread the news to her friends since she was very active on the Internet and had international friends. My mother had purely altruistic motives. My sister had actually told my mother her password, but because of the trauma of the situation, my mother couldn't remember. My mother ended up remembering it a few days later when she could think clearly. I didn't realize it until it happened, but when your sister dies, you want people who loved her to know. There's this need to want people to know what happened, no matter how traumatic. We still can't reach one of her old friends. I understand the privacy issue, and I treasure my online privacy too, but I agree with other Slashdotters...when you're dead you're dead and the secrets you leave behind don't matter much anymore. There's not much use for it there. But if there's a use for the family, perhaps looking for things to hold on to even for momentary comfort, I think that's the right thing to do. I think the real issue is ownership. Yahoo owns the servers, and thus our web-based e-mail, no? When in that case, the analogy of say my father dying and me inheriting his car wouldn't work with e-mail since e-mail isn't owned like a car.
I worked at a financial services firm for many years. As most of our clients were older, we had to deal with this kind of issue fairly often (several times per year at least). Get an official copy of the death cert and a notarized copy of the will (if there is one) or living trust (even better, paperwork wise) or durable power of attorney (best of all). That would be enough for us to provide account information without upsetting the SEC, who are fairly strict about privacy issues.
Barring that, it shouldn't be terribly hard to get a court order, and we all know how eager ISP's are to comply with those when law enforcement come knocking. There's nothing of any particular interest on my machine that anyone other than me would care about (except the MP3s). My wife already knows my passwords, which makes this not a problem anyway.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I have been corresponded with many prostitutes and it would kill her to see that.
I've left my close and trusted friends with a copy of DBAN and had them swear to wipe all my boxen completely clean... I really don't want friends and family and the world to know all of my dirty little digital secrets. Frankly I agree with Yahoo's decision.
- dshaw
With all the "smart clothing" coming up, soon we'll run TCP/IP stacks on our body. And ofcourse, wireless internet will be pervasive. So, when the microchip detects that you died (your heart stopped and did not start again for x amount of time etc), it will send an encrypted command through the Internet to your server. Your server will run a script which will destroy all sensitive data on your drive, and e-mail all important stuff such as passwords (encrypted, with a shared one-time pad with people that you trust) and other data that is important. Of course you will have to find a way to test that this setup works without actually killing yourself!
Are there any online references to that? How was the situation resolved?
I believe your story; I'm just interested in finding out more.
Now I have to change my password.
paintball
I'm sure none of you would abuse it ;-)
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Dead?
Yes.
If you have ever seen the show 'Coupling', you need a Porn Buddy. Someone you have a mutual agreement with to go to your place and clean out your porn should anything drastic ever happen to you. :)
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Compile a list of passwords.
Break it into M components, such than N of them are required to be reassembled to create the list.
Give the M shares to trusted friends and family -- i.e., such than no N of them won't collude to fuck you over.
When you die, instruct the executor to re-assemble the shares.
They're just being prudent. They do not know who owns those emails now and are understandably leery of allowing access. It isn;'t like it can "take them back".
you don't need passwords to read pen[cil] on paper
rules are rules. it's too bad their child died, but really, this is unnecessary. i applaud yahoo! for sticking to their policy
vodka, straight up, thank you!
I for one am sick of the concept of passwords for accessing information. Passwords make life online a pain in the ass. I access dozens of sites a day and hundreds of sites a week. Many have their own passwords and own password standards so that I can't even use the same password. Most contain only mildly sensitive information anyway. Having a different password for each site is overkill.
What we need is a browser that prompts for our keyphrase the first time a site requires authentication during our session. We should need only one keyphrase per user. Using an id seed that the site requesting authentication sends and the user's id seed the passphrase should be hashed into an individual return code that works only between the user and site in question. Thus the user need only remember their one passphrase but can access each site without giving away the passphrase to the sites (which may not be trustworthy).
This system would be more secure as it'd not require writing down your passwords or saving them in your browser.
My system would help in this situation because it's much easier to write down one passphrase for your family to find in case of your death than it is to write down 400 url, username, and password groups for them.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Set-up a cron job on your desktop machine that periodically queries Google and looks for your obit. If found, it connects to your bank and sends a check for $1000 to your worst enemy. It then mails said enemy a (pre-dated) message (CC'ing yourself) saying: "I'm sending you the last FINAL payment. Don't try to blackmail me again!". Next it e-mails your mail ID and password to your family and finally the script erases itself. :-)
[Insert pithy quote here]
Yeah, I'd prefer the image my family had 'before' they read my emails.
I seem to remember a skit on some comedy TV show about a service you could hire to come and get rid of all the porno mags/videos, drugs, sex toys and incriminated evidence and replace it with religious objects, awards and classical novels. Ya know, just so your family is left with a 'good' image of you. I think this falls along that line.
While there aren't many 'objects' I'm ashamed enough of I'd pay people to come hide before my relatives rummaged through my stuff, I'd definitely pay somebody to torch my computer the moment my pulse stopped.
Why not brute force the account or try some logical passwords? Is your dead relative going to sue you? :[
---------
In the end we are ALL disconnected....
Plus think of the flaming possibilities. You could instruct your surviving loved ones to flame as much as you want, knowing full well no one can touch you in return (unless you believe you are experiencing literal flaming after death, but that's just the risk flamers take).
The well known science-fiction author Robert Heinlein actually did this, in print, not on the Internet.
In his will, he requested that his wife publish a book entitled "Grumbles from the Grave". It detailed his gripes against his publishers, and other people he didn't want to offend while he was alive for various political reasons.
I found it for sale in a K-mart bargain bin, but I didn't buy it, though I was amused by the premise. I wasn't all that interested in listening to a dead man whine about his publishers, though he definately did get the last word.
--
AC
If you value things enough - you don't keep them based in Yahoo mail accounts. You keep them in safe deposit boxes, left with family members, in wills, etc. You don't keep them in free email providers. I hate to break it to you, but if a family member didn't put it in a "safe place" then it probably wasn't important enough to them.
I support Yahoo's stance in this matter. While he's dead and really doesn't have a care in the world, because nothing about him besides a pile of flesh exists..
Out of respect, what if there were things he never wanted them to know? What if he was gay and having an internet relationship with some man, and his parents were anti-gay? They would then be left thinking they never knew their own son, and all of this crap.
If you want people to have access to that sort of thing, leave them access. Put your passwords in a safe or something if you MUST write them down.
Yahoo and others should not be giving access to an individuals person email, dead or alive. I don't care if the family presents a death certificate or not. You should have a reasonable expectation of privacy and deceny even after death. Let your personal life die with you.
i just got back from my friend brian's funeral today. after seeing this article on slashdot, it really strikes some nerves with me. brian was a techie, and i had set up an electronic memorial for him at www.brianchrist.com. i had planned on contacting the ISP of his personal website in order to transfer the domain so that i could maintain it. if you read on the memorial website, there is a striking and emotional email that brian had written to a friend just prior to his death. in a case like this, this email was read at the eulogy and allowed many people to catch a glimpse of something that is now lost. i don't disagree with yahoo's stance, but i do think there should be some exceptions.
I sent to following message to the abuse desk at Yahoo, listing 'Your Management' as the abusers:
"The dead marine can't sue you. Tell your management to take their balls out of their policy and procedure file and give them access to his email. It's all they have left of him and it's Christmas. Tis the season and all that..."
Whether I'm right or wrong, I'll never know. But it certainly seems like the human thing to do.
That way... if you don't want people to get access to your account after you die. It's there for it to be known.
IMHO I think quite a few people would object to that becoming public after they die.
In my will I have specified who to mail, my forum accounts, and their respective passwords.
But frankly I'd like Yahoo to provide a "virtual funeral" service, and mail my contacts with the news of my passing away. Obviously this would require a "death password" or something, that I'd keep in my real-life will.
Frankly, with all this online virtual stuff, I think it's about time the internet has obituaries or something. How is it that you have an identity on the internet but there isn't a way to "die" there?
Imagine a town where people wouldn't die but just go missing with nobody knowing where they went, expecting that they'd come back a year later with "sorry guys i got married" or something.
It's this lack of acknowledgment that bothers me. I know, anonimity, blah blah....
but couldn't people have a local service in their city that would set up a "global ID" account, linked to their real accounts or something?
Frankly, with sci-fi so ahead of us in the "cyber" terms, (GITS, Matrix, Neuromancer, etc) how couldn't people think about this *little* detail?
I just refused to die.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think this is a good thing. Even though he died a tragic death, for Yahoo! to expose his account would have set a bad precedent. I've always been uncomfortable considering what would happen should I meet my untimely end, what with people cleaning out my apartment and such. The Internet is unique in that no one has to clean out your possessions.
If you want to have someone get access to your account, give them the passwords or leave them in the will. And don't argue that this is a unique situation: If anyone should have known they were going into a dangerous situation, a soldier heading to Iraq should have known. Otherwise, if you haven't given out the passwords, your information stays private. There are no legal concerns, no arguments over property rights, no question as to your death. If Yahoo! is allowed to start giving access to someone's account upon death, where would it stop? What about a father with parents AND children? Who gets the password? What about an estranged wife with two sons and a husband? Who gets the password? Do same-sex couples count as "password eligible?" What about in cases where someone is terminally ill or on their deathbed? Or in a vegetative state? Or missing?
I'd rather avoid this mess altogether. It's probably spelled out in the Agreement you said "Yes" to when you activated your Yahoo! mail account, or at least it should be. And I'd like to commend Yahoo! for sticking to the rules and principles they built their system on, even in the face of a torrent (not a BitTorrent, mind you) of negative publicity.
sending email! We /.ers get to talk about
stuff that really matters!
So maybe at a seance, your loved ones can still read your mail to you even if the medium doesn't know the password.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Philosophy catches up with the 21st century. Next question; where does the recyle bin actually lead?
I my family got ahold of my passwords now that would probably precipitate my death so lets leave well enough alone!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Why not use the blown up media attention you are getting, to give out the guys email address. Even if it gets spammed, there is the chance that some nice person would try to crack it, and if not, then just request that all his penpals, or whoever, forward their sent/recieved items dealing with this guy. I am certain quite a few people will get the news, it was on the CNN top news stories at 10:00 United States CST (16:00 GMT)
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
I'm sure most of everyone has heard of dispoable e-mail addresses. Want to sign up for that newsletter, but don't want them to have your real e-mail address? Give them a sneakemail address. Not even my bank has my real e-mail address.
So how does this tie into this story? Easy. You can write notes in your sneakemail account for every address you create. I use sneakemail as a master password. If anyone has access to my sneakemail account, they have access to everything I do online. Thankfully, sneakemail has maximum of 30 letters on their passwords, and the option for a secure sign in. It would be rather simple to make a very difficult to break passphrase that could be left in your will, or in a safety deposit box tied to your will. Want a bunch of files to be read after you die? E-mail them to a web-mail address with enough storage, and then keep the password in your sneakemail account. I'm yet to find a Windows based method of deleting everything on your computer when you die. I imagine it would be rather simple on a *nix box.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
This was on the man show, before it went to shit. THe one with jimmy kimmel and adam corrola.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Bill Hicks once said: "I'm not affraid to die. I'm affraid of my parents cleaning up my apartment and finding that porno wing I've been adding into.
So, my point is, I do NOT want my relatives to find a bunch of emails confirming subscription to Horny Cum Slut Paradise, no matter how much it would help them remember me.
While I recognize this as a controversial issue, the fact is we don't know the son's wishes and, as with other things in relation to someone's wishes when they're incapacitated or dead, the family is often the last and final source for the individual's wishes. In this case I think the least Yahoo could do is stop being a coward and hiding behind their privacy policy and respect this families wishes, especially after their tragic loss and the pain they must be sufferring - there's no need to make things worse for them - not when it can mean so much to the family and so little to Yahoo. Hence, for anyone who wishes to send Yahoo an email (hopefully in support of breaking the rules on a case by case basis - such as this) I've provided their email address - if you have a GMail account, you might try sending your email from it and pointing it out to them in the email that your write.
Public Relations: pr@yahoo-inc.com
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
So why do I need access to my email from my previous life?
This policy is crap! The flippin' FBI can access my account without my knowledge or consent (with a FISA warrant) but my family can't access it after I die? The executor of your estate should have access to all of this. What if there is important information in there? Like the name of the person stalking you?
Does anybody know a e-mail address at Yahoo that we can write to complain to?
Keep all your passwords in a password-vault type app. Keep a note in your safe deposit box mentioning the existence of said app, and the password to access it. You should keep it in the same envelope as, or in the text of, your will-- banks will let relatives who have the key into the safe deposit box for the purpose of retrieving the will, but they won't let you take anything else at all IME.
If there's some stuff you don't want your relatives to know about you, then keep the passwords you want them to have in that database, and keep your goatfucking fetish porn site membership credentials in another password database, the password to which dies with you.
The email or other electronic records are property just as paper letters are. By default, you don't have privacy in death as your paper letters are inherited by someone unless you leave provisions in your will for them to be destroyed. If you are a famous person, your person letters are likely valuable property.
I don't see why email should be considered any different. Yahoo's position really is that your email is not personal property. They "own" in the sense of controlling the property while it's on their servers. I don't think Yahoo's objection is really about privacy. They don't want your email to be considered property because they could then be sued when they accidently lose it, not to mention the administrative costs of dealing with probate transfers. If this was really about privacy, they could give make the disposition at death user controllable when the account is created.
I doubt this issue will be fully decided by the courts until some famous author dies and the only copy of their unpublished work in on some server somewhere and worth a lot money. Then the family will sue for access to the valuable property which they've rightly inherited through the will and the courts will be forced to decide whether ISPs can destroy property on somebody's death.
It's too late for this dead bastard. But now that Yahoo's policies are known, Johann Bin Laden will surely notify the family before giving away corpses as wedding presents.
I know this is off topic, but Showtime has decided to cancel the hit show Dead Like Me. Surely there has to be a lot of slashdotters who are fans of the show.
As much as I think it won't help much, there is an online petition at this link
They need all the signatures they can get. If Showtime won't renew the series, maybe somebody else like SciFi will see how popular it is and pick it up. Remember the same thing happened with SG-1 and it became a BETTER show.
Is that you think it's ok to substitute your own personal judgement for the rights and judgement of others.
You didn't have to deny the request of the father. You just had to EXCERCISE DUE DILIGENCE in making sure that the person on the other end of the line actually was the father, and that the customer in question was actually dead.
You were LAZY, not righteous.
paintball
If an email address has not been used in a year, and someone comes around claiming the data, and can provide vital personal data, he should be allowed the data.
For one, I used my first name for the first hotmail account when it was new in 1996 or something. I lost the password, and made a new one. Looks like that name is still taken and I still cant claim the login, will soon be 10 years for that account sitting dormant.
The second reason was provided by the story submitter, a dead persons emails. The dead mans switch should send a custom email to friends if the account hasnt been logged into in a year, containing all online passwords. The only problem being if two friends use each other as backup, and they die in a car crash together, the data is still lost.
I recently lost someone in the family, and saw her name come up in msn messeger, as they booted her computer, but once they logged in as someone else, that login was lost too. Microsoft will sit on that one for another 10 years.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Passwords? My relatives get to drag my dead body back to the PC so they can use my thumbprint to get my stash, um I mean data.
Any thoughts?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
It asks for zipcode, birthday, country, and some question you specify, like "what's your hometown".
Wouldn't his family know that stuff?
Have they actually locked down the account?
Months ago the gf of my best friend was missing. As there was no message left, no fightings happened and no stuff was taken away, her missing looked suspicious. My best friend was one of the main suspects. Anyway, several weeks later she was found dead in a river, cause of death: suicide by drowning.
Well that girl also has a yahoo mail account. During her missing, authorities were not able to get access to her account (living in a western european country). The Microsoft department on the other hand helped to get access to her hotmail account.
Now the story ended sad, and i feel it very questionable that her parents have no right to access her mailbox. Some written words, no matter good or bad, are still much more valuable for them than knowing nothing at all.
Um, I think a little sensitivity is called for. The deceased account holder was killed in (I believe) Iraq and was probably too busy doing other things to archive his email to non-volatile storage. And even if he did have time, he was in a f* ing war zone...
Mourn the loss of a good person, sympathize with the parents for their loss of a child, but do not overrule the soldier's decision on his email. It was his data, if he wanted it shared he propbably would have left a password behind. Your "too busy" argument is junk. People who volunteer for the military know that combat and death are possibilities, almost no one is deploying to Iraq without some kind of advance notice, and soldiers are encouraged and reminded by the Army to get their affairs in order. He didn't have to put it in a formal will, all he had to do was leave an addressed letter in his footlocker. If something happened to him the parents would get it. That fact that he did no such things suggests he didn't want his email to survive him. Grieving parents should not be able to override this.
I lost access to my old Yahoo account by requesting a new password be sent to me. Unfortunately, the alternate email I had on file has been non-existent for years. :(
Yahoo refuses to even reset my password to what it was prior to my new-password-request...
Just imagine if someone else had requested my password changed. Sure, they wouldn't end up with access, but they would have sure effectively stopped mine.
Luke-Jr
Roy Batty:
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
Right thing == !Wrong thing
Yahoo! should have a tick box in the subscription form which says something in the lines of "I want to grant access to my data to my heirs after my departure" and one oeither ticks or unticks as necessary.
Problem solved.
- "They misunderestimated me."
Sucker. The word is sucker. And thanks to you and your kind, identity theft is a lot easier and more profitable than it would otherwise be.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I need to change the name of my 'Stuff' ;-)
- did everything possible to inform all of their friends and contacts, and
- wanted "things to hold on to even for momentary comfort"
In our case, email wasn't an issue, but there were certainly plenty of letters, accounts, photos, safe-deposit boxes and all that to go through.In the case of letters, whether electronic or paper the writer generally is the owner of the copyright, even if she isn't storing them at home. Ownership then goes to the next of kin as with any other possessions. Yahoo here is acting like a storage unit, but one which claims it can keep your stuff not only if you don't pay but also if you pass away. If your dad kept his car in a storage lot (or his papers in a storage unit) you'd have every right to claim it as part of his estate.
Privacy in death has to be up to the individual *before* they die. Once you're dead, you cannot dictate what people do with your posessions other than the normal process of distribution through wills and trusts. Destruction, on the other hand, isn't something you can force your estate to do (if you told it to burn the manuscripts or put down the parrot).
If the deceased had wanted others to read that email, wouldn't he have used CC on them?
These are just people dealing with a great loss and looking for something - anyting - to hold onto. But Yahoo! should not give them access to any of his accounts. Sorry.
your grandfather sent you email during WWII?
http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/ReleaseDetail.c fm?&ReleaseID=148239
(yes, 'yhoo', not 'yahoo'. Clever, huh? Keeps us from flooding her).
Let's let her know our feelings. I've read most of the thread (whew!) and I can understand those supporting Yahoo! (but not those who don't want their pr0n, etc. discovered--hey, you're dead; why do you care they'll all find out what a perv you were?). Let's make it a vote. Write Ms. Mahon and let her know what you think, what you want them to do with your stuff.
Sig not available, please try again later. If the problem persists, then the submitter is an idiot.
your family can always search for them on groups.google.com after you die.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
simply float a rumor that your dead relative may have been communicating with terrorists....then Yahoo or any other ISP will roll right over!
This is over liberal use of red-tape. It is insane and insensitive. Shame on yhoo.
I don't really get it why everyone talks about what we really want or don't want to happen with our accounts after death, when Yahoo's decision was made on purely financial (and perhaps practical) reasons. Had they decided to give families access after your death they'd have to hire people to shift through all the necessary paperwork plus phone calls with no profit at all out of it. They'd also have to deal with all the forged death certificates they'd get from people trying to break into other accounts, possibly creating liability issues for Yahoo if they gave out passwords to the wrong people.
Too bad there's no (-1, Kdaptist) moderation...
I think the real issue is ownership. Yahoo owns the servers, and thus our web-based e-mail, no?
NO.
Maybe Yahoo's policy, or laws say otherwise, but consider this: When you ask people, many feel that e-mail has similar function, and should have similar legal status (privacy protection and such) as snail mail.
I looked it up once how this is for postal service where I live: if mail bags are stolen, whose property was it? What I found, is this:
Law says that you are free to do with whatever you want to mail, until you drop it in a mailbox. As soon as your hand lets it go, that mail becomes the personal property of the addressee you wrote on the envelope. The postal service is never a 'temporary owner' here; all they do, is transport that mail to the addressee.
Now with e-mail, I feel you should treat that similar. You can change your mind as often as you want, but at the moment you click "send e-mail", the e-mail becomes the recipient's property, and all the ISP's do, is transport it, and keep it stored on their mail servers for a while. Remember, we're not talking about a comment on Slashdot or other public forum, but a private message from person A to person B.
So what if you mother wrote a love letter to your dad long ago, your mam & dad die, and you inherit their belongings? Right: you could read your mams letter, even if it was originally directed to your dad. But that is normal, right? Ultimately, it's just property that gets inherited. You should expect though, that 3rd parties that keep property, should check, and possibly only respond to court orders that confirm someone has died, and who inherits what (and confirm identity of people who claim belongings).
Same here with Yahoo: they should just sit on it, until they have confirmation about who inherits what, and then pass any stored info to those who are entitled to it.
Where does that leave you? Simple: just consider what you have laying around, online, things that get sent to you, and what you want to happen to that when you die. Then act accordingly. Like put some passwords in a safety deposit box in a bank. Encrypt files you don't want family to find when you're gone. Or download mail to local storage, so that family could find it on your PC after your death, but delete mail that you wouldn't want them to read.
(See? I told you...)
Have to apologize - please see the details from my other posting regarding Yahoo's Public Relations email address - EXCEPT - don't use the email address provided, it's no longer active. One which is apparently active is: info@yahoo-inc.com so you might try resending any emails to that address. Sorry
The executor of a will has a fiduciary responsibility to secure and preserve all of a deceased person's assets. Presumably this would include email archives, which could contain important/valuable information. If I was executor, I would get a court order for Yahoo to preserve the account and grant access.
If he had secrets he felt he needed to keep hidden I hope he did the work one needs to do to keep them hidden in life as well as in death (if in death you don't have cares, you also don't have embarrassment).
If you have letters, photos, books, or other evidence of your secret life, you do have to work to prevent them from going into your estate at your death. Simply storing letters in a hosted email service, like storing letters in a storage unit, isn't sufficient. You'd have to make special arrangements to keep your post office boxes and safety deposit boxes private after death: the default is that your estate gets distributed, not destroyed. If you have storage that's not under your name, and that only very trusted other people know about, then you might keep it out of your estate. Simply putting letters into a safety deposit box or storage rented under your own name hasn't ever given people pre-death privacy, let alone after-death privacy.
In this case there is no evidence the soldier was trying to keep this address private. I assume he emailed his family from it, because his family members knew it existed. In this case his Yahoo address is like a post office box or a rented office unders one's own name. Offices or mailboxes are private in life, but once you're dead they're part of the estate. Heck, even if you're incapacitated they aren't private. I've had the terrible burden of holding a POA for a severely ill person- for all intents and purposes I was legally that other person. Medical records, bank records, storage units, probably even his Permanent School Record: all legally accessible to me, and again, that was when he was alive. Generally after a death there'll be at least one person with at least as much access to your stuff.
So Yahoo is acting like the exception here, not the rule, in denying his family / the estate access to his items stored at Yahoo. Of course, given how easy it is for the FBI / CIA / NSA to get into Yahoo accounts, why would anyone store anything private there? A physical storage unit would at least require a subpoena (or non-payment) before other people could get inside.
For email privacy that survives into death you'd want an account where you use heavy encryption, never use your real name (emails can always be forwarded) and use onion routers (thanks, EFF) to get to the account. For physical-item privacy you'd need to do the same sort of work. Harsh, but that's life.
As for the soldier's family, they should tell the RIAA / BSA / FBI he was storing music / illegal copies of software / subversive literature there. After a few minutes Interpol should copy the account and shares it with other agencies. Then a FOIA request should get them the emails after a few years.
I'm sick to death of these register for 3 hrs and proceed to logon a bunch of times to 'protect' me services. If I don't want a password or if I want someone else to access it that's my fucking problem not yours.
Here's your fix: include two a radio buttons, and over them one sentence - "Do you want to email this password to anyone else?"
yes
no
There that wasn't too hard, was it?
Shit at least it's not the WWE website which makes you register for about 20 minutes, mails you your verification, forces you to verify your verification, then makes you logon whereby you proceed to spend your own money. And in 3 months when you revisit the site they've trashed all the registrations 'for your saftey and protection sir' and force you to go through the whole thing again.
So fuck Yahoo, fuck them all and their 'security' which isn't and if I want to give my passwords to the entire staff of the Bunny Ranch then that's my deal.
I'm not very proficent with cryptography, but as far as I remember the algorithms with Trusted Third Party should solve the problem.
Actually that are many solutions, however why worry when you're dead? It's my opinion and you might not agree but once you're dead nothing really matters, at all.
I imagine it wouldn't be that big of a deal to get a judge to order Yahoo to not delete the account pending resolution of the issue in court.
Leaving our passwords after we die is actually part of the company policy for my employer. I am required to disclose any passwords used in case of my own death.
==========
Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
==========
Johnny: I was hit by a truck!!
Girl: OH MY GOD ARE YOU OKAY??
Johnny: noooo I'm.. I'm dying...
Girl: OHH MY GOD!!! AHHHH Please don't die!!
Johnny: i'm...sorry.. i'm wounded too bad.. i
Girl: you POOR thing.. any last words?
Johnny: my.... my....yahoo password is.... A0152....5
Girl: oh my god! whats the rest?
Johnny dies!
Girl: holy $%IT!! he's dead! this isn't happening! noone will ever know his yahoo password! (cries)
go to www.deathclock.com and make arrangements for your data to be sorted out according to the result.
I couldn't think of a sig.
Got a warrant signed by a judge? Or was that just supposed to be a sorry excuse for a strawman?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
This is why I intend to include all my major login/password information in my will. It will be a document given to my next of kin as a stipulation in the will, so that they can:
1) Keep or remove my email & websites if they wish
2) Access the files on my (password protected) computer for keeping whatever they want.
3) Cancel any subscription-based services I'm signed up for, so that they don't keep getting bills monthly or annually.
4) Contact my friends whom I only know online, so that they are aware what's happened to me (and can pass that on to any mutual communities we're in).
I don't want to simply drop off the face of the 'net with no word.
my relatives to see membership emails from bukkake-poney.joy
My mother's Yahoo! password no longer works and she has no access to her Yahoo! mail at all. For some reason her password that she has had for years simply fails and we can't reset it because the reset information fails as well. I contacted support and got a phone number for her to call - when she did they told her that they couldn't help her because it was a free account. How do you deal with this when someone hijacks your account and changes your zip code?!?!
:(
I guess the only recourse is to open a gmail account and hope Google doesn't turn into d*cks like Yahoo! did.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
This is one of those times, you hear something so stupid it makes you want to commit a crime. I actually hope someone cracks the yahoo site and grabs this families fathers emails for them. This is beyond nonsense. This man was fighting for our country and Yahoo has the audacity to say no?? I'm really friggin pissed off right now with this nonsense. Who the hell does Yahoo think they are? YAHOO... HAND OVER THE FATHERS EMAILS TO THE FAMILY YOU BUNCH OF....
For Windows
Are soldiers really allowed to send private email via Yahoo from Iraq? I would assume there is some monitoring and censorship involved. But if so, are the the troops aware of this policy? If the military also has copies of the emails, could the relatives circumvent Yahoo in their plea to obtain them? If the Military does have access to them, I do not see the harm in them disclosing it. I am surprised some employees are not aware that email and phone calls made on company equipment belong to the employer, and that deleting them does not erase any backups that might exist. And little recording devices are so prevalent now that anything you say could easily be preserved and played back to unintended audiences (ex: Linda Tripp). A cliched litmus test for applying limits to the Freedom of Speech is yelling Fire in a crowded theater when there was no evidence of fire. I believe that is a reasonable scenario. Then why allow soldiers to send email that, intentionally or not, might endanger lives? But we should not be deceived about the truth of any war. Personally, I think we are on the downside of an exponetially decreasing oil shortage, and while oil profits are an immediate factor, survival is the issue. During the Vietnam War, soldiers mailed letters and journalists reported the events. Now, so many reporters work for elite corporations with partisan, short-sighted, greedy agendas. It is a different world. The difference today is that we are held more accountable for who we are, due to increased documentation, and profiling that will become so much more sophisticated. Would making an exception to the Yahoo privacy policy by giving the family access to the email records set a bad, or irrelevant prescedent? How could the receipients ever be certain that the emails are unaltered?
ALL YOUR PASSWORDS ARE BELONG TO US!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
My father died suddenly 5 days before my wedding this year in October. I now have his laptop and have his desktop on the way here in the mail.
I had to find my way through onto the laptop, thankfully it was WinXP and I could get in (but it was harder than I would have thought).
Hotmail was actually much easier since the "Forgot your password?" functionality had hints that I knew the answers to and could then get it back. I then remapped his MS passport to a new password that I could easily remember.
The key thing to remember about Hotmail accounts (I am assuming only the free ones) is that if they are inactive for some period of time (I think it is only 28 days), then the account gets killed.
So I have to go in periodically and check his e-mail and see a lot of spam.
Sometimes there are people that write to him to see how he is doing and I have to write them from a separate account and let them know what has happened, or at this point I am starting to just let it slide.
He was one of those people that never deleted his e-mails, sent or received, since he started his account a few years ago - so there is a lot of good stuff to go through and read.
We still haven't figured out if there is a safety deposit box out there or not.
If you don't have a will, you really should make one that details out every little thing - and passwords too if you have them on important things (and they aren't on Windows systems).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Dear asswipe:
In the future, when stymied by the lameness filter, I recommend copying the article text, translating it using babelfish into some random language and then back to mangled english, and posting that to trick the filter.
...while their pr0n is oft interred with their bones.
In the 15 minutes before you die just leave a series of cryptic clues which will eventually lead your family members to the contents of your yahoo account. Next problem?
Everyone here has online friends, right? People who you have never met in real life, but mean a lot to you nonetheless. Well, if you die - who is to warn them?
I think a solution can be writing a note like this, putting in an envelope labeled "IN CASE I DIE", and hiding it in a drawer, closet, any place where no one would mess unless you were dead...
---
"If I die, these people must be warned:
[LIST OF EMAIL ADDRESSES]
[LIST OF MESSAGE BOARDS]
My websites must be
[MODIFIED, DELETED, TAKEN OVER BY SOMEONE ELSE].
[LIST OF WEBSITES, FTP ADDRESSES, PASSWORDS]"
Circumcision is child abuse.
When you die, all the encrypted stuff in your brain goes with you anyway, so why shouldn't the digital extension of self on a server somewhere?
This seems to be the general additude of big,
multinational companies.
Has anyone had any experiences, sucessful or
not in getting the e-mail passwords of deceased
relitaves who used a "mom and pop"email server?
The legal heirs should have access to the info. Probably they should have just have a lawyer send the right kind of request to Yahoo, or get a court order. Of course Yahoo should not give them access just because they say the guy is dead. But through the correct legal channels they shoud be able to get access.
I see a lot of people advising that you leave your password in your will. This is retarted! For starters, every time you change your passwords, you have to redo your will and have it witnessed again - that's not sensible.
Rather keep your details separate to your will, but in your will advise people how to get to them. A safe deposit box at a bank, etc.
If you are so adamant about your family seeing your email when you die, print up the emails you want to seen before you die. Yahoo is doing the best thing, I do not want to worry about my family reading my shit when I die. Yahoomail is a free email service investigating into deaths and handing out passwords is beyond their scope, it can only raise problems and costs. Wake up dolts.
Most of the shit on bestseller lists for non-fiction is trash that will be forgotten in 100 years. All these stupid mysteries, they will never reach the status of works such as the Illiad and Odyssey in the pantheon of literature.
Yahoo should not delete accounts of dead users. I think the best policy would be to encrypt them with Yahoo public key and release the encrypted data to relatives. That way the data is not lost irreversibly, Yahoo! privacy policy is not violated and if in the future something changes (Yahoo policy, morals of our society, etc.), the data can be decrypted.
:)
:)
I personally don't intend to die (I'm a transhumanist), but if I would, I really wouldn't care whether my personal e-mail are released. I mean, my family members already know about the worst things I did and they managed to accept it.
But Usenet posts you made when you were 14, that's a whole another story... Those must not be seen by anyone.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Who cares. They have Gigabit in the afterlife don't they?
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
That's thee origin of the term "no carrier (pigeon)".
--- Ban humanity.
Solution #1: Access on death
:).
ISPs and service-providers can put "access on death or disability" provisions in their contracts, similar to what bank accounts have. If you die or become incapacitated and your family or estate provides documentation, the provision kicks in.
Solution #2: Legal changes
State laws can change to provide for access to be included in a will: I, davidwr, hereby bequeath my yahoo account and all of its content to my firstborn son, davidwrjr... This is more meaningful if the account is a paid-for account rather than a free one. Of course, you can will that your account be zapped
In the meantime, write down your passwords and file them with someone you trust to NOT look at them until you die or become incapacitated.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
No references online that I know of. I heard about this from the bank staff. I was across the hall whacking on the loans software at that particular moment.
Her account and balance were fixed in record time. There were many apologies from bank management, however she closed the account immediately and moved to a less friendly, more process-oriented bank on the other side of town. Can't say I would blame her. The poor branch manager was a nervous wreck for three days. Never found out if anything ever happened to the father.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
One of the military traditions not often mentioned is your "Porn Buddy". (OK, get your minds out of the gutter) If you are killed, this is the buddy that goes through your personal effects and pulls out anything that your family doesn't need to see.
Now that we're in the 21st century we need to expand the duties to include cleaning the things out of email accounts that you don't want your family to see.
I've always had someone hold a few letters to be sent in that unfortunate event when I've deployed. I've already added my various IDs and passwords to this one.
It may not be forever, but it could be around as long as the Internet is, if archive.org's WayBack Machine has anything to say about it...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Big if- what if archive.org loses their domain name, or the city where their server is gets hit with a nuclear weapon (I think somebody already mentioned John Titor's predictions someplace recently). But thanks for the link- I was unaware this existed, and it reminded me where my e-mail address on my home page is hidden.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Recently one of my close friends died and I found it upsetting that her emails are impossible for her family to access, if only because she left no password behind. She wrote often and I kept correspondence between us. I keep some letters, but I understand that if I die, my family will discover them. I can censure what I decide to keep. Emails are different in that a password implies that only I can read those emails, so there may well be material which might be hurtful to others once I'm gone. Unless a family is left a password in a will, those emails should remain private, as they may not have been filtered in the same way as a collection of letters in a shoebox would have been. A family can never be sure if their loved ones would approve. However, I'm sure historians would sleep more comfortably at night if users were able to opt in to have their emails archived for a hundred years in the event of their death. On the other hand imagine the SPAM they have to contend with! My advice. Leave passwords in wills.
A year or two before my father died, I gave him vanity e-mail address on my server, mainly to get around the constant changes to his e-mail address everytime his ISP got bought out by another. This turned out to be useful when he became incapacitated in the hospital, and later when he died. While he was in the hospital, I wanted one of his passwords to inquire about something in one of his accounts. I realized that with his e-mail account, I could do a password recovery and get what I needed. So I just started forwarding his e-mail to me instead of to him.
:)
So if you happen to have a server capable of meeting all of your family's e-mail needs without cramping their style, this ain't a bad way to fly. Of course, when I die -- well, that's somebody else's problem, isn't it?
RP
How 'bout using computer forensics on the computer of the departed? A TON of information may be found in slack space and elsewhere on the computer, and this is what I'd first be inclined to do if someone came to me in this prediciment. Of course, the best case here is if the computer was not touched after the person died. Or, at least, if a time / day of death could be established such that the investigator knew to look only at search results from BEFORE that time / day.
AOL is like every other megacorporation out there, you can't just ask them. They don't understand anything but lawsuits, so sue the crap out of them. And don't buy that "We'll delete everything in 90 days" crap either, law enforcement email wiretap laws (CALEA) require that they keep copies of emails for years (but it wouldn't hurt to get a restraining order before starting your lawsuit as IANAL).