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Dispute Continues Over Posthumous Yahoo! Mail
XPisthenewNT points out BBC coverage of the earlier-mentioned dispute between Yahoo! and the family of Justin Ellsworth. An excerpt: "Police sergeant John Ellsworth has sparked a privacy debate in the U.S. that has prompted many to reconsider who can access their e-mail. Mr. Ellsworth is locked in a legal fight with Yahoo! after his son, L/Cpl Justin Ellsworth, a U.S. marine serving in Falluja, was killed by a roadside bomb."
Really? Because I'm in the US and I haven't heard about it anywhere other than here.
of that comedian joking about not wanting to die because of the dread of his parents finding the "porn wing" of his apartment.
Since the messages may be valuable (although probably are not), shouldn't it be a simple matter to claim they are part of the estate and get a TRO and be done with it?
After all, the copyright is held by the decedant, so wouldn't that material value pass to his heirs?
as a non-lawyer and a non-law student:
the family will need to prove that the yahoo mail account is property, and as such becomes part of your estate when you die, so you can will it to someone. what happens to property that's not in your will when you die?
i think yahoo is just covering up that they already dleted the account, honestly.
-mkb
TFA doesn't mention anything about whether or not this young Marine had a will. I would imagine(please correct me if I am wrong) that the Armed Services would provide some type of legal services for will making for him. If he wanted people to read his mail, it should have been in a will......
Monstar L
The dude is dead. It should be a simple matter of checking who he [dead dude] emails. If it's
mother@isp.com
and isp.com confirms the identity of mother then why not just go "oh, ok here ya go eh".
I swear, sometimes I think I'm a farking GENIOUS.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
IANAL.While I truly respect privacy rights, even after a person is dead, perhaps a little common sense (or adjustment to the appropriate laws) is in order. Why _not_ let the family of this person have access unless that person has a will or last testament that says otherwise? Why proceed from the other direction that assumes the deceased would not want his family to have access even though there is no documentation specifying that?
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
Email is not the only thing that can have this happen - you can also have the same sort of problems with a bank safe deposit box.
If you have a safe deposit box in your name only, and you die, until the courts approve of your estate's executor, nobody will be able to get to the contents of that box - so think twice about putting anything in a safe deposit box that would be needed by your survivors within a month or less of your demise.
www.eFax.com are spammers
. . . would be to respect the wishes of the deceased in his agreement with Yahoo! that no one would get to see his stuff when he died.
The guy did agree to the Yahoo! thing.
Did he ever leave any other writings contradicting himself?
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
If the father is the son's legal next of kin, then the son's property belongs to the father, if I understand the law correctly.
It is the father's e-mail account, and privacy has nothing to do with it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you want your family to read your email after you die, tell them the password in your will. If you don't, tough. What could be there thats important?
This is an opportunity to start a new service providing what this family is being denied by Yahoo. Conditional E-mail forwarding?
In the real world, what is done with your safe deposit box, or your post office box if you die and no-one can find the key? I really don't know the answer to this, but am wondering if the precedence/situation might apply here at all.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
When a loved one dies senselessly, a natural human response is to lash out at the first target that makes themselves available.
I feel very sorry for the parents.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It never ends, even after you're dead.
Perhaps we need an option added to e-mail accounts. Like a checkbox that says, "Check here if you wish to let __________ inherit this e-mail account when you end up dead." The blank line would be either another person's e-mail address to receive the password, or a real life name and address.
I agree. I completely side with Yahoo! on this matter. Unless they can prove that he wished for them to have that access (which it appears that they cannot), then it should not be granted to them.
was the account willed to anyone?
is yahoo a private company? who signed the contract of terms of the usage when the account was created?
unless there are credible, legal (i.e. non-sentimental) reasons that the email account needs to be accessed, i don't see the fuss.
if the one who was killed meant emails to be a journal, he should have sent them out, not keep them in his account. sorry and sad to say, but he knew that there's a real danger of his life ending suddenly.
if this is let out, what's to prevent, say a widow, from snooping into the dead husband's email account to find evidence for suspected affairs and leverage those findings to increase the claim to the inheritance?
why don't they crack into his email account?
It seems to me that Yahoo! should update their user's agreement to deal with this problem. Basically, they should allow users to specify how they want next of kin issues dealt with. Some people may opt to allow relatives to access their mail after death, while others may prefer that they delete it all. There should be a way to specify this. I suppose you could do it now by simply spelling it out in your will.
On the other hand though, if I have a box of old letters, I wouldn't expect any level of privacy with respect to that box on my death. In the end though, none of this really matters to the dead person, but the living sure do get worked up about it!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Agreed. WTF do they want to read his mail for anyway?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Nope. You don't own a webmail account, you have a service agreement (for a service which, in the case of most Yahoo mail accounts, provided free.)
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
If it is a service and not property then property law does not apply. When they delete your account after 90 days of inactivity can you sue them for destruction of proerty? IANAL, but I doubt it.
In this case I believe Yahoo! is arguing that the deceased gave up any inheritance rights when he accepted the terms and conditions, which stated that property rights cannot be transferred even in the event of death.
If you want people to have access to your accounts, you had better document the accounts, the passwords, and the access methods for them before you die.
Why should my survivors get access to stuff in my virtual world after I die if I never gave them any rights to it while I was alive?
I understand, or at least I think I understand rights of survivorship. I have sympathy for those who have lost a loved one, but I don't see how that makes any legal difference.
So let's say that I'm involved in a bunch of stuff that I don't want my survivors to know about, and we automatically give them rights to my virtual stuff when I die. They find out what a bastard I am, and their memories of me are forever saddened.
Here's the opposing question: If we start handing out access to online resources when the account holder dies, don't we also have to make everything include an option to delete upon the death of the account holder?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
"The man is devastated at the prospect of his son's memories, what essentially could be his son's last written words, being obliterated forever. Just let him see it," writes one contributor.
So, is the father interested in looking at the inbox for the received emails? That doesn't make sense, as most of the incoming mails into the account wouldn't be written by the son.
Or are they interested in the "Sent messages folder" to see the son's last written words? If, as the above excerpts suggest is what they're interested in, they could directly approach his friends (or the other way around) who might have received his last emails.
In any case, I don't see a reasonable justification for them to access all the past communication their son engaged in - it might even be embarrassing. In some cases, it's best to let the dead bury the dead.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yahoo dictated the terms of service to their subscribers. They did not negotiate a contract, or ask what their customers preferred.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Yahoo! will drag this one out till the account becomes inactive and...
remember folks inpostal mail we have the saem rules..
Its illegaql for a non recipent to view unless recipent gives permission..
and that is a standard bnoth in USA and Europe..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It's not like I would want my family to read my email if i died. That's why I have a password! I don't leave my password on a sticky note for everyone to see. The dad knew he had the best pay porn sites in the world and would continue to use em if only he had his son's email password.... I guess i would want access to his email also.....
We live in a world where your loved ones aren't allowed to access your mail after you're dead, but gmail can "read" through it to target marketing to you... and keep reading through it post-mortem for deeper demographic research?!?
I don't care if gmail is using computers to do the heuristics. In concept, access is access.
Perhaps the parents are taking the wrong approach: maybe if they can come up with a good marketing reason (like, a book about their son), that'd melt the hearts of Yahoo execs.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
"Yahoo! says it must nevertheless honour the terms of service which all 40 million US Yahoo! account holders must agree to. These state that survivors have no rights to the e-mail accounts of the deceased." Isn't Yahoo in effect saying you don't own your e-mail? (or rather, you don't own the copyright?). And do other ISP's have a similar clause in their T&Cs? What about the web pages you host on their servers? Do the rights to those also "lapse" upon death? Sounds to me like an unenforceable contract...
If I died I sure as hell would not want my family looking through all my email. Sounds like his family is just a bunch of assholes, especially since they already knew he was in a situation with a high danger and could have easily worked something out.
I have no idea what it must be like to lose a son that way. ...but what if this guy finds out that his son, the soldier, had an insatiable for gay porn?
There are things we don't want to know about people - its probably best not to go digging through their most personal stuff even after they've died.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Is that Justin Ellsworth probably didn't even read the terms of service when he signed up for Yahoo email.
Certainly, he doesn't have much of an expectation of privacy now that he is dead.
Yeah, right.
Having had to deal with dispersing the estate of family members I would have to think that this was a service that the deceased has subscribed to and it is the duty of the person with POE to properly close it up and deal with it. I don't see how Yahoo would be able to legally refuse in this case. As for the privacy aspect I don't see this really being an issue. You have died. You have selected (or had someone selected for you) to act on your behafe to take care of your afairs. Now I know that all my experiences deal with Canadian law but I can't see it being much different in the states.
He clicked "I Agree".
Are you calling him a liar? Show some respect!!
The article mentions AOL and Hotmail, what does the Gmail service agreement state?
I want a gmail account. Can someone help me
Though I understand the moral implications, giving access to his emails will set a precedent for a lot of con-artists to fake deaths and obtain access to sensitive emails (indentity theft?). Keeping is closed is hence prudent.
INFECT MY TEST MACHINE PLEASE AT:
http://138.147.8.100 (unpatched WinXP and IIS)
I have a couple points. Does anyone actaully fill out their proper information when creating a Yahoo account? I do not think my family could prove I owned the account.
If I want my family to see my stuff when I die I will give them the password. I am in the middle of creating a cribb sheet of all my current accounts so that they can put it in their safety deposit box as a just-in-case.
The father might own the copyright. But if I write a book, photocopy it and give it to a friend as a gift (with copy right notice). I loose my orginal. Does copy right law allow me to require him to give it back to me? (I know if it is a friend he would do so anyways)
I don't actually understand this.
One sends emails to someone else rather than back to yourself so why do they need to get them from Yahoo?
I'd mod you up.
dude, are you high, or just typing with your feet?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Indeed this is interesting considering that if you claim to own the copyright by stating
(c) DenDave 2005
Then it is as such
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
The same could be said for the gallon of milk I bought last week at the supermarket. That doesn't make it any less of an agreement. Yahoo (supermarket) offers something, and establishes the terms, we choose to accept or reject on a case by case basis.
A modern day witchhunt.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
An old girlfriend of mine died in a motorcycle crash. While she was still alive, she told me her password for her e-mail account (my name - easy to remember). I only logged into her account once while she was alive (she was standing next to me and asked me to do so), so I know the password was correct. Hours before she set out on her fateful trip, she sent me an email which I only received after getting the phone call. At this point, I tried to log in to her email account to see if she had left behind anything else there but access was already blocked. After the funeral, we cleaned out her apartment. We found her diary (I knew she had one). However, she never explicitly said anything to me about whether I should read it. Diaries are a private matter, so when her stepfather gave it to me (her mother had passed away already and her half-brother was just too young), I went over to her best friend's house, we talked about it and decided that we would burn it in the fireplace together. My point is, common sense should have some say. In spite of any agreements with Yahoo!, etc., if my name is the password and I know it, wasn't this proof enough that she had agreed that I should be allowed to access her email? On the other hand, without explicit permission, I'd never read someone's diary, it's too private. Perhaps his Yahoo! account was Justin Ellworth's diary of sorts ....
That what you've got Porn Buddies for (a friend who, on hearing of your death, will clear the porn out of your house before your parents get round).
In the USA, if you've done POA and wills with the assistance an attourney, they'll explain that the POA ends at death and the will kicks in.
The article states "the young soldier had spent much of his spare time e-mailing his folks back home through Yahoo! webmail."
That in mind, why don't the "folks" have the e-mails that he sent to them? Wouldn't you keep (even treasure) the e-mails of a family member, especially if the family member was in a situation where death may be near?
Or even if they deleted the e-mails, I'm sure they replied to them first, so maybe they have copies in their Sent folder.
It takes two people to e-mail, and even if Yahoo! won't release the e-mails I'm sure the OTHER end of the conversation may be more willing to do so.
1. reset his password.
2. send an anonymous letter to his mom/dad with new password.
3. Mom/dad login and claim that they cracked his password.
4. Yahoo can maintain that they held their ground.
5. Mom/dad get what they wanted.
6. Son rolls in grave as his mom/dad find out about his intrest in (insert_bad_stuff_here).
My son has done three tours in the middle East. My husband and I treasured every email that he was able to send, read and reread them and kept them in a special folder with his name. He sent us what he wanted us to know. If he had been killed, I would have respected his right of privacy. The other emails, I'm sure, have to do with gaming, interactions with his friends and military humor (not always tasteful). While getting the other emails may have been nice, anything he wanted us to see he would have forwarded. There is much going on over there that he will not tell us, even now that he is back. I would not have fought the deletion of the emails out of respect and love for my son. I question why it is so important to the family to get the emails.
Get a "porn buddy". See Coupling Ep. 1 for the explanation...
No, posting a copyright notice does not make it copyrighted. Anything you create is already your copyright.
Posting a copyright notice is the equivalent of posting a "private poroperty" sign. The property was already private, you're just letting folks know it.
Emails are like letters, and letters are property
of the estate. Unless there are specific instructions to the contrary(like in a will)...your heirs should get your emails like any other document.
The privacy claim of yahoo is nonsense, the click through is standard boilerplate and is not intended to supersede the rights of heirs.
The post office cannot withhold your mail from your heirs, what gives yahoo that right?
This problem arised because the dead soldier's parents do not understand the proper way to use a free e-mail account.
All of the messages that the parents want to retrieve from Yahoo had been already sent by their son, or already sent to their son. In either case, the parents had a copy of the message at some point in the past, and they chose not to save it and back it up properly.
Instead, the parents assumed that Yahoo was a reliable archive for old e-mail messages -- which is very risky considering that Yahoo is a FREE service. If those e-mail messages were REALLY that important to them, then they would have ensured that they were backed up properly.
I'm sorry for their heartache, but it's the same heartache that millions of people experience every year when they lose their important documents or priceless photos or whatever, because they didn't understand the importance of making backups.
Did they force him to become a customer?
He could have used another mail provider.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
The deceased obviously clicked on the "I Agree" button when setting up the account. Whether or not he read the full terms of the agreement was up to him...but he still agreed to them. So I unfortunately have to say, "I agree with Yahoo".
However, that doesn't mean that I don't have compassion for his family. Since the Yahoo agreement clearly states that police can access Yahoo e-mail accounts, the father should approach the military and get the Military Police to make a request....they could say they are investigating his death and that the e-mail is relevant to the case.
reallu badlu.n Tehy work reallu well youkmow.
From the Yahoo! Terms of Service:
"All your base are belong to us!"
Unfortunately, that just about covers it.
S
The media should dig deeper. There is no "ownership" of this email beyond Yahoo's. It owns the email, it just grants you access rights to it, and has decided not to grant it to heirs. If Yahoo, for whatever reasonm, decides to terminate your account (for "violation of TOS") then you lose all access to *any* of the information stored on Yahoo's servers: email, photos, contacts, files, mailing lists, notes, etc. Yahoo doesn't even have to to tell you what you did to lose your acces rights, it can just say "NO ACCESS" and you're toast. Do a search and you will find hundreds of people vainly trying to recover lost data from Yahoo's servers.
Yahoo is evil, plain and simple.
Da Blog
would I want my parents to see some of the emails that I've received and gotten from others? absolutely not! Those are private and only between the persons involved. If I wanted a particular individual to see something, then I would have sent an email specifically to them or put it on a public forum, i.e., a blog site.
If I send an email to someone, I expect that the email is for his/her eyes only - and to not be shown by anyone - even after death. I think this case is quite ridiculous, and I think this father may have this oh so goody two shoes vision of his son shattered if he gets access to his emails.
Recently a client told me that his free Yahoo mail account's email archive completely disappeared. He tried yelling emails into the black hole of human-free tech support but got nowhere of course. This isn't the first time this had happened, he said. So in this guy's case, I'd say it's remarkable that the family found someone to talk to about the emails or lack thereof.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
Not necessarily, since is son was legally an adult then that law wouldn't apply. I'm not even sure if it applies in the case of minors anymore (IANAL!).
My view on this is that they where private e-mails, his son never divulged his password to his Father because maybe he didn't want his Father to see them.
We must also remember that the people who sent e-mails to his son, wouldn't their privacy be breached if they where released?
All this being said, I hope it gets sorted out soon one way or the other for the benefit of his grieving family. I lost a child with a miscarriage and that was awful enough, I cannot even imagine how bad it would be having watched your child grow. I hope the fact that he died with honour serving his country will come as some comfort to them.
Here's a question that's bugging me:
If you are an ISP and operate a POP3 server for your users, the users hold their own mail on their own computer. In this case, ownership of the messages is pretty clear -- they're stored temporarily by the ISP, but this is transient, while the only permanent copies are under the direct control of the user.
If you are an ASP (like Yahoo! or Hotmail) and you provide a web-based mail application, and your users keep all their messages on your server. Here, ownership gets murky -- it's a free service, subject to terms and conditions, and everything lives with the ASP.
Now, another poster suspects that Yahoo!'s main motivation is to prevent establishing property rights for the users' mail stored on Yahoo! servers. I suspect there is truth in that -- Yahoo! should certainly want to avoid having to deal with the whole issue. If they assert that they only provided a service, and that there is no property to be transferred, that may do it.
I think that's a obvious divide for now, at least with regard to mail -- if you want control of what happens after you die, you had better either A) use POP3 and assume direct custody of it so it can be physically transferred later, or B) make sure others have access to your online accounts before you die.
The question arises: If you can establish that there isn't any property right for web-based mail services (and by extension other web-based services), doesn't that also effectively establish that the ASP owns your data? Maybe "ownership" is too strong -- there are still substantial restrictions as part of the terms of service -- but it definitely would appear that the ASP would effectively own your data. Is that where we're headed?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
If the emails they received from their son are so important to them, they should have kept them in the first place.
How important were these e-mails to the father? Shouldn't it say something that he deleted them from his e-mail program? The article says that he e-mailed his folks from Iraq, so the father should just open Outlook Express and check the Deleted Items folder....
Attackers wanting access to your accounts could provide information to Yahoo that indicated your death. They could claim, for example, that your account was opened under a fake name, and here's a death certificate for the real person whose account this is.
This opens up a major avenue of attack on peoples' privacy. I want this family to get the email from their son, especially if he wanted them to be able to read it (his journal), but I can see how this would be a fairly major burden on Yahoo.
It's not so much that they have to check out your claim of death. The problem is they never checked out the deceased's real identity in the first place when they gave out the account! Anyone can claim to be anyone else's next of kin, you don't even have to have a name match. If someone wanted to check out my spam bucket email address, they'd probably have some problems. It's not as if I gave my right name.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I wonder if the family had tried to reset his password. I just tried with my yahoo account. It asked me for my birthdate, zip code, and what country I was in, and the yahoo ID. Then I clicked next. Then it asked me a question, which I gave the matching answer to, and it reset my password. Has the family not tried just going through this process?
Yes.
At what point is the alternative too costly to be considered?
eg. What if all car makers forced you to agree not to sue them, before you could buy your car, except for one company, whos cars are priced at $500,000+. In that event, obviously people are forced to agree to the contract. The question is, where is the line? Alternatives to Yahoo Mail have just about the same agreement, so you are pretty-well forced into it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Send an email to the acocunt and ask if they are dead.
If they have other information in the Yahoo system, like an alternet email address, or a phyiscal address, use those routes as well.
Then if those fail, verify the death certificate.
Clearly, if the l=military says he's dead, and the family says he's dead, his family should get his emails, journal, etc . . . a long with his other personal effects.
Note, I said his emails and not access to his account.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is this some kind of joke? I mean what on earth has Yahoo got to loose if it provides the password to his family. And what the family has got to do with his emails. I mean surely he has sent some mails to his parents, brothers, sisters, etc. Why not keep them as a rememberance. I really don't get the purpose of this drama. Anybody care to explain?!
analogy:
if the son owned a car, that car now belongs to the father. however, a contract he may have had with a 3rd party for maintenance to that car my very well be void now, since it's a service, not a product.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
are virtually always part of the processing line when you're loading up your stuff.
When you're getting ready to be deployed, you show up to a hanger/building down on the flight line with all your stuff, and you go through a processing line, complete with various stations. ID station, SGLI station, equipment checks... there's even a station for wills. It's a requirement.
D don't doubt the Marine corps does something very similiar; it's been that way every single time I ever deployed.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
For all I know, Yahoo does not save the messages I *send* unless I tell it to for each message. It seems like the family wants access to messages that their son received. Why should they, or he own the property rights to those messages? It seems that their copyright should be with the the people who wrote them. They should already have all the emails he has sent to them, and if they cared all the emails they sent to him. What is it they want to see exactly?
E-mails are not like letters. Letters have a physical component. E-mails have a physical component only if they are downloaded to a disk, which the deceased did not do for whatever reason. If he had downloaded the e-mails, the family would have the rights to that physical property. He did not.
To further blow away your "e-mail = mail" misconception, read about your employer's ability to snoop through your e-mail. Opening somebody else's mail is a crime, but e-mail lacks this protection.
Let us not forget the other parties involved, either... Everybody who sent him e-mail, or received e-mail from him, also has a right to privacy. This right will be violated if Yahoo gives the family access to those e-mails.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Is the slashdot crowd turning into a bunch of nepotists that only see what they want to see? Yahoo! isn't evil. This is a tough problem. There could be all sorts of info/writings in his email that he wouldn't have ever wanted his family to see. Yahoo! isn't saying "No" - they're just saying "we can't make the call - bring a court order and they're yours." BTW - you KNOW the privacy folks will scream and attack if Yahoo! does give them the account w/o a judge's decision. It's a lose-lose for them and they're trying to do the right thing. Wake up slashdotters!
Hi, are you dead?
If we get no reply, we'll assume you're dead. If you're dead, we'll give your information to these people who are asking for it. They say they're relatives of yours.
How is the above going to prove that the person is even dead, or that the person is really who the requesters say he is, let alone that the people requesting his emails are really entitled to his information? People sometimes go for a long time without checking their email. People also lie.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It's his ESTATE. The executor of the estate has the LEGAL DUTY to wind up the affairs of the deceased. The email may contain important information vital to carry out this duty. (EG, electronic account statements from creditors)
There is a SHITLOAD of precedent regarding how the personal effects of a dead person should be handled. Estate law (under English Common Law, on which US estate law is based) has precedents going back to *at least* the Middle Ages.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
It seems to me a lot more straight-forward for this family to merely contact all friends of the deceased and ask that they forward any e-mails to / from said person which they wish to share.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
If he had wanted his family or others to read his messages, there is a little feature he would have used. Its called CC.
He didn't send them the email, therefore it is none of their business. Son or not. They aren't trying to unravel some murder mystery or something. It was his personal email. Key word is PERSONAL.
Note to all military personnel. Start a BLOG so your family doesn't go nuts.
P.S. Bring the troops in Iraq home already.
but I will be anyway. There is no / in LCpl. Sorry, just had to do it.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Do dead people have a right to privacy? The more conservative members of the court aren't even sure that living people have a right to privacy. Personally, I think that if Yahoo owns the mail they manage for people they have the right to not give it out, *but*, if they don't own the mail and the recipient does (which I believe should be) then that data must be transfered to the executor of the estate of the deceased.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
This could be a publicity thing for yahoo concerning rival google and there http://www.google-watch.org/ questionable privacy practices. Then again the EULA was agreed upon by the deceased so they have a ligit right to refuse access.
To further blow away your "e-mail = mail" misconception, read about your employer's ability to snoop through your e-mail. Opening somebody else's mail is a crime, but e-mail lacks this protection.
This is completely false. If you receive a letter (regular mail) at work, it can be opened and read by the company, unless obviously marked as "personal" or such. Most companies have policies that email is not for personal use, so they can presume that there are no "personal" letters in your email account. So, for all effective purposes, your rights are the same.
Learn to love Alaska
Generally, you do not have privacy rights in your communications to other people. It is presumed that someone could be overhearing / listening in. So 3rd parties in this case don't really have any rights.
If you who email / communicate with people besides your doctor or lawyer, don't think the other party or their successors have a duty to be tight-lipped.
You basically have a contractual issue: does the clause giving rights to yahoo apply?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IANAL but I've checked the terms of service in yahoo mail's server and I think yahoo is doing the right thing.
Assuming those terms did not change because of this mess, J. Ellsworth should have read this paragraph:
No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! I.D. or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted.
It should be logical to assume that he did not want that mail to be revealed to the public (he wouldn't have chosen yahoo mail if that was the case).
If he did want his mail to be disclosed, he should have had some sort of escrow account (that's one of the things the cc header is for anyway).
The interesting thing is that the family is in a tight spot right now. If they do not prove him dead, they have no right to access his account. His father is definitely committing some sort of crime if he's hacking his account. If they prove he's dead by presenting a death certificate, yahoo could immediately block the account and erase the mail, and that would be ok (if they have not done yet, it is pretty evident he is dead now).
I haven't though of that, but I wouldn't want anybody messing with certain things (like my mail or my private key) when I die, especially if I can easily set up some escrow system in advance (like he should have done if he really wanted his folks to access his mail, after all he wasn't going to a picnic, and he knew it).
Yes, I'm being really blunt, but diplomacy is not one of my strong points (and it's too damn hot in here, so I'm not in my best mood).
GPG 0x1B479C78
Just ask Monica Lewinsky (thats phone instead of mail, but same principal)
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
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My family has no right to my emails unless I gave them the password. After I die, I fully expect my email accounts to expire after some amount of time and the contents to be deleted. If I wanted them to have this info, then I'd have passed along the password.
And Yahoo! shouldn't be put in the position of having to verify that people are really next of kin and that users are really deceased when they don't have any way to verify who the heck uses the email account in the first place.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
How many people actually put their real name in Yahoo anyway. I'm sure there are thousands of Mickey Mouse's with yahoo accounts. Who's to say your relative isn't one of them.
Im not an idiot and Im not a redneck(im fairly liberal) and you dont know what you are talking about. Yahoo email is still personal correspondence regardless of boilerplate clickthroughs.
1. Yahoo policy is NOT law
2. Yahoo policy cannot supersede law
3. Any Yahoo policy contrary to law is unenforceable.
The legal system views mail and correspondence as property, property belongs to the estate after the person dies. Yahoo cannot strip rights away using boilerplate language. Those terms can be found unenforceable if they are against public policy(ie enforcing the legal rights of heirs and the legal rights of the estate is considered good public policy).
Also if yahoo owns your email is upheld, there is nothing legally preventing them from publishing or selling your email after you are dead.
I recently went through a similar thing concerning a Yahoo! Group. I found a group in Yahoo's directory, joined, and started reading the back messages. From the back messages I found that the group had been victim to a bunch of spammers - the owner set the group up wide open, no moderation at all - and a bunch of the active members had gone off and created a new, better managed group.
I attempted to contact the group creator with no success. As far as I know, he may have stopped using Yahoo!, died, who knows, but he has certainly abandoned the group. I contacted Yahoo! about closing the group to new members, getting moderator status, whatever. Their response was that their privacy policy only allows the group creator/owner to make such changes.
I understand their point, but it creates an environment where groups can be orphaned by single owner/moderators and group members are powerless to fix, close, or do anything other than go create another group covering the same subject.
- Jasen.
Imagine that, after a heavy court battle, the guy is finally allowed access to his son's e-mails, only to discover that (in addition to the 2093049 spam messages) he did not check the "Keep copy of message" box so there is nothing to see that he hasn't already seen...
Perhaps we need an option added to e-mail accounts. Like a checkbox that says, "Check here if you wish to let __________ inherit this e-mail account when you end up dead." The blank line would be either another person's e-mail address to receive the password, or a real life name and address.
Of course some concrete proof of your death would be needed from the named party. Your e-mail provider would have no other way of knowing you actually had died, after all. They'd have to know ahead of time that you had made them your "e-mail inheritor", and at that point, it's easier to just give them a sealed envelope with the URL, username and password, to be opened in the event of your death.
Freedom: "I won't!"
That's only hacking in the same sense that my roommate turning on my computer and messing with it while I'm at work is "hacking".
Freedom: "I won't!"
I don't want my father or mother reading my E-mails after I'm dead.
If I wanted them to, I'd leave my password with my lawyer as part of my property listed in my last will and testament, the same as I would for a house or other property.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Maintainance contracts aren't a good example, since they're often transferable with ownership of the device.
For example, I have service contracts on my furnace, hot water heater, and AC unit. If I sell the house, the contracts automatically transfer to the new owner. If I die, my next of kin (my wife) inherits them along with the furnace.
The difference is that the contract is tied to a physical item.
I've been through the whole will and division of estate thing. It's not cool at all.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Agreed. Who gives Yahoo the right to decide what happens to your property? It is up to your will and the executor of your estate to decide. Yahoo is going down the wrong path here (as are most of /., it seems).
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
The Yahoo account is an agreement between Yahoo and a person for limited access to Yahoo's storage system.
The copyright in the emails authored by the deceased is owned by the deceased's estate. Yahoo happens to own media on which a copy of the emails is stored.
The deceased has no right to access the copy of the material on Yahoo's media without Yahoo's permission. Yahoo gave the deceased permission to access the material on their media for a limited term, which ended with the deceased's death.
Owning the copyright in a particular material does not give someone the right to look at copies of that material on other people's media. If it did, the RIAA could force you to let them listen to your CD's. If the record company has a huge fire and all their copies of their copywritten material burns to a crisp, they can't compel someone else with a copy of that material to give them access to it.
In this case, the only thing the copyright ownership gives the estate the right to do is demand that Yahoo delete the copies of the email from their servers. And it CERTAINLY doesn't give them the right to look at emails in the account authored by other people which the estate does not have copyright ownership of.
If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because they own the copyrights in the email, than any publisher would be able to look at any copy of anything they publish, which is obviously not the case. If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because of the agreement between the deceased and Yahoo, then clauses which terminate a contract at one of the party's deaths would have to be invalid, which is also not the case.
No one has the right to access anyone else's property. It doesn't matter if the agreement between Yahoo and the deceased eliminated the "right" of the deceased's estate to access Yahoo's media - that right never existed in the first place. The estate has to prove that Yahoo agreed to give them that right, which they can not.
paintball
I would urge Yahoo to change the terms of service to allow survivors access to email of those who die. It's good public relations. All Yahoo should need is a copy of the death certificate or some other paperwork to release the emails.
The other possibility is they are stonewalling because the Dept. of Defense fears or knows there is sensitive info in those emails and doesn't want it released. And Yahoo can't talk about it. If that's the case then the emails should be turned over to DoD and censored as needed and the rest returned to the family.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
There's probably a will. Service members are strongly encouraged to make out a will before going into a combat zone. And it might not name the parents.
> E-mails are not like letters. Letters have a physical component. E-mails have a physical component only if they are downloaded to a disk
Just curious.. but how can Yahoo have these emails unless they physically exist on Yahoo's servers, which from my experience usually exist on disk.
So if they would exist if they were on my computer, and they would exist if I put them on a floppy or cd-rom, I can't see why they don't exist on Yahoo's storage medium.
Or is the suggestion that Yahoo's copy was given to them rather than stored with them?
As for the privacy right of others, that doesn't come into play. They sent the email, and as you pointed out, if they sent it to me at work my employer can read it without worrying about the privacy of my mom, my mistress or my gay lover or whoever else might be emailing me.
Here's a question. If this was a PO box, could the estate request access to it, even if they didn't have the key? I'm guessing yes.
Basically it doesn't come down to a privacy issue at all. Dead=No privacy. It comes down to whether the terms of service contract trumps the executors access to the deceased's estate. Dunno. Ask a lawyer. Or rather I guess they'll ask a judge.
And personally, while I'm not thrilled that my mom may see my collection of.. um artistic expressions of human beauty if I snuff it today, I'd rather have a relative read my stuff when I'm dead than have the email provider hand it over to the cops while I'm alive.. but hey thats just me.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible -W.B.
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If I were Yahoo, I would have to say no as well. Let's look at this logistically, from the standpoint of an ISP/company.
First off, the email is private (barring illegal eavesdropping), period. Yahoo has an agreement that the information is yours and you trust them not to show it to people, regardless of who.
Second, you have no effective way to verify the identity of a family member. What is Yahoo supposed to do? They don't even necesarily know that John Smith is the owner of the account to begin with, since all they have is a web form to sign up for the service. Then, they're supposed to give access to John Smith's family? That means for every request like this, Yahoo has to verify who owned the account in the first place, verify that the person is dead, then verify the family identity. All this just to keep their promise to you that your information is yours only. Or...they can just deny the request because it's NOT their job to go around doing detective work to support a request like this.
I'm deeply sorry for anyone who has suffered a loss, and I am not unsympathetic to the family, but this is just doesn't make sense for Yahoo to comply with it.
-Jay
It might be too late. Once the story went public, Yahoo probably disabled the account.
Aside from the fact that what you're describing isn't hacking -- Yahoo's "forgot password" form only displays a new password if, when creating the account, you DID NOT specify an alternate email address. If an alternate email was specified, an email will be sent to that account with the temporary password.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The dad just needs to get over the fact that he needs email to remember his son. I may sound harsh, but the son had expected his email to remain private when he was alive. It's time to put the issue to rest
Because your employer is reading data that exists on their property! Your employer has no right to access Yahoo's servers to read your e-mail, and Yahoo's privacy statement is pretty clear cut. If Yahoo violates their privacy policy, they will be violating the privacy rights of the people who sent or received those e-mails.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Justin was a neighbor of mine for about two years before he went into the Marines. I can't say that I knew him real well, (he was more my daughter's age) but I thought of him to be a very couritous and helpful young man. It is my belief that he would have wanted his father to have access to his account.
Not entirely true
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Actually, you must assert your right... http://www.bris.ac.uk/research/ip/copyright.html "The author can assert his moral right to be identified as the author of a work - the author must assert this right, it is not automatic. "
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
That's a good reason to use an mbox somewhere. Then whenever your online accounts start to get full, you do an IMAP flush or pop nokeep with fetchmail and pull everything into a spool. Then your online accounts have plenty of space, but you have all of your mails on a hard disk. You can then easily copy it anywhere and read it with emacs or notepad if you like.
Your mail is then preserved for yourself, or your survivors.
I do this about quarterly, I have an old OpenBSD box at home that I dump anything I want to keep onto. I have a little script that pulls down all of my mail from all of my accounts using fetchmail. Whenever I want to back up or move the mail somewhere else, it takes two mutt commands to mark all as read and dump it in your mbox from the spool.
It may have changed, but a few years ago I had password issues with my Yahoo account, and the only thing I needed (I could have been anyone) to gain control and make a new password, was a bit of personal info that family would know anyway.
Such as birthdate and postal code, or something like that. I was shocked - even an angry ex could easily take over your account and ruin you. I then tried to change my birthdate to something fake, but Yahoo won't let you - it's the key info to verify it's really you.
Of course, this is before I realized that I shouldn't be giving these organizations my real info anyway. I signed up for Yahoo in 94 or 95.