Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
. . . 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.
Leave the accounts and passwords in your will. Seal them in a saftey deposit box.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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.
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.
Thinks Hrmm.. He said +5 Funny and gets modded +5 Funny. *POP* I got an Idea /Thinks
Well.. Anything of mine worth reading is already +5 Interesting.
Yeah, I don't think Yahoo wants to get involved in ensuring that a supposedly dead person matches up to a particular account. Imagine if Yahoo announced that they would allow this -- it would probably be abused to get access to other people's accounts, and would probably expose them to lawsuits too. They're too big to do something like that.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
The point is, that there is/might be some family history in those letters.
I dont know about you, but i plan on outliving my parents. When i die, my children (if i ever have some) will be old enough to understand love and what else i write.
Freedom or George Bush
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.
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?
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?
Why? You some kind of asexual saint? Or just a hypocrite socially conditioned to be embarrassed by your nature?
Everybody's a horndog. Evolutionary selective pressure favors the sex-obsessed.
I'll wrap this post up now; have to go organize my new DP porn downloads...
Power to the Peaceful
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
Passwords are too insecure, or if you choose a secure one, too hard to remember. I choose entire passphrases from movies, music, whatever, complete with punctuation.
My home root passphrase: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
My home user passphrase: "Think bule count one two"
Workstation passphrase at work: "Soylent Green is people."
CC Website passphrase: "Another day older and deeper in debt"
Bank account passphrase: "Blew it all on the suit."
Home Windows computer passphrase: "MAIN SCREEN TURN ON"
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
But there exists the possibility that the other person may still be living, and if they choose, they can divulge this information, however they should have the option not to divulge it as well.
The privacy issue doesn't just affect one person, but both, especially when sent email is saved.
I'd think that most parents wouldn't care if their children saw such notes, but I'd think that many children would care if their parents read such notes of theirs.
No data, no cry
It certainly would be interesting if yahoo mail accounts turned into the defacto The Speaker For The Dead
Aside from that, why should yahoo take on the burden of due diligence to prove someone was actually dead as well as the people who want the access are legit. It's much easier and certainly less liability to simply say they aren't going to do it. Want more from your email service? Try paying for it to begin with.
When my father dies, there will be little left of him but pictures and my memories. If all goes as planned for me, when I die, there will be an e-mail trail going back decades. I already have e-mail stored going back probably 7 or more years (some of which dates back to BBS QWK mail packets, if anyone remembers those).
For this reason, I have treated my e-mail as sort of a personal diary or blog, often e-mailing myself all sorts of things I want to keep. In them you will find my religious views, my political views, lists of CDs and DVDs I own, and messages from close friends.
The only down side to this is using an e-mail client that keeps things in a proprietary format. Unless you store in an easily portable format like HTML or text, you run the risk of having a ton of data that nobody knows how to read.
I backup in the proprietary format of my e-mail program, but I also export to html. I then keep copies of this on CD-R, with a copy for myself and a copy I keep at my parents house in case my house burns down.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
I'm curious how such a study could be conducted. Wouldn't you essentially be only polling people who are willing to freely give away their passwords? That would seem to bias the "study" toward those who choose idiotic passwords.
What would other statistical gathering techniques be in such a project, other than malware?
Sigs cause cancer.
When my significant other died, it would have meant all the world for her (much) younger sister to have access to her yahoo account, for two reasons:
1. things happened suddenly, and suddenly everything left behind by that person was now precious. everything. imagine you're slipping over a cliff, and desperately grabbing at any sort of purchase you can find. it's sort of like that.
2. she associated that SN with her sister, which they would talk on and email often because her family was in australia. the idea of somehow seeing it in use by someone else was... not sure how to explain this, except it wouldn't be something one would want to experience. yes you can take the person off your messenger, and you can block the list... but it's just the idea.
I have to admit that I spent hours and hours late at night trying to guess her password, and some other things after yahoo said no, but will also admit i was one of many things I was doing to try to keep my mind busy and off of everything else.
I do recognize that there is a right to privacy, and that aspects of things might not be healthy... but it doesn't work that way when you're going through it. Your world is upside down, and what is rational and what isn't doesn't really matter. Yes, not having it isn't the end of the world... but seeing one more piece of that person just slip away into the ether, while possibly romantic to a 16 year old, is just a horrid thing to contemplate.
When you're living your life in your mid-20s, you don't think about throwing your yahoo password in your will for your significant other... or often a will at all. This isn't something I expect a typical slashdotter to understand, it's just how it is... I'll leave it at that, as I'm finding myself way outside of my comfort zone at the moment.