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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."
it might not be that simple if yahoo claims they are providing a service and all your message are belong to them
-mkb
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.
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.
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?
Tough. Yahoo can't presume to think and speak for the dead guy. It's the terms of service which the millions of users have agreed to. If the family wants to put up a geocities web-shrine they could use their own email from the guy (assuming they were smart enough to save it) but not mail to others.
Trolling is a art,
Yahoo! will drag this one out till the account becomes inactive and...
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.
That kinda brings up a point. Other folks emailed this guy assuming that it was confidential.
I feel for his family, but the other folks involved have privacy rights as well. What if friends emailed him some very private, personal email asking for advice. Email provides more protection, than say snail mail which anyone can read (granted not ALOT more, but at least someone has to have the id and pw).
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Of course, that's nothing compared to dying, rotting, and decaying and realizing you're not getting there because it doesn't exist. Except that you'll be dead so you won't be able to realize it.
Mmmmm, fertilizer.
Bollocks, anyone who sends an e-mail to a yahoo, hotmail, etc account and thinks that it is "private" is off their rocker.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
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.
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.
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.
Hmm...I don't think what you spend your time doing defines wether you are an adult either. On the flip side, does something more refined such as "Spending time reading history books" make someone an adult in your mind?
To me, it has more to do with culpability. A 35 y/o who spends his time drinking and partying is as much an adult as the 24 y/o who cures cancer. Being adult is not about "how good a person" you are, but simply a state of "ok, now you are old enough to be fully responsible for your actions, good or bad". I think you reach that somewhere around 14-16.
As for the issue of so many 18-20 y/o's not being very responsible, that has more to do with how they are/were raised. When kids aren't given any responsibility, they never get responsible.
A modern day witchhunt.
If the emails they received from their son are so important to them, they should have kept them in the first place.
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?
You replied:
I'm sure it's been the target of a few crackers, and they haven't gotten into it either. My daughter and I were having a discussion about passwords, and she told me about how her password was impossible for anyone to guess - so I told her what her password was. Freaked her out, but if you know someone, you can usually guess their password with a few tries.
That the father was unable to says two things - 1) the password was not easy to guess, even by a family member, and 2) it was not intended to be easy to guess by a family member. He DID email them stuff he wanted them to see. So its safe to assume that he DIDN'T email them stuff he didn't want them to see.
You wrote:
Unless the house is specifically willed to me, or there is some legal provision that I get it, then I have no right to it.
I certainly don't have a right to the pay-per-view tv service that they subscribed to. The webmail is a service, not property. The only "property" (the servers, etc) is that which belongs to Yahoo!
I wrote:
You replied:
He is no more the owner of the account than he would become the owner to a pay-tv subscription service, or an internet service, or any other service.
I wrote:
You replied:
No, email is NOT like postcards. You need a user name and password to access my email, even though it's stored in plaintext. If it's "just like a postcard", why is the father whining (because that's what he's doing) about not being able to read it? Answer - because it's NOT "just like a postcard".
You continued:
Hey, RTFA - He DID send stuff to his parents, in plain text, over the internet. It is not Yahoo!'s job to determine the reasons why he didn't send other stuff to them, or to second-guess the account-holder's wishes.
I concluded:
You replied:
What - now I'm going to have to worry that agreements I enter into will be modified posthumously and/or by relatives who "think" they know my wishes better than I do?
If I was Yahoo!, at this point, I'd do the following, so as to assure my 40 million other users that the TOS they agreed to WILL be respected:
Yes, TFA says that, but it's wrong. Being the owner of the copyright of something DOES NOT give you the right to demand someone who legally has a copy (as Yahoo obviously does) to hand it over to you, even if as here that is the only copy left. Copyright gives the owner the right to prevent someone else publishing; what's being talked about here is almost the opposite, forcing someone to.
You burned it?
I don't think burning interesting documents is ever the right thing to do. Writing is the most important historical data we have. Moreover diaries aren't always meant to be eternally private. I wouldn't mind if people generations on looked at my writings. Keeping something off limits for a certain time can be reasonable but forever destroying information just strikes me as sad.
What's done is done but I hope other people aren't so quick to burn writing.
NO, NO, NO. You're confusing the issue. If I run into an author (say Stephen King, for example) and I'm carrying a copy of one of his books, can he demand the book from me because he owns the copyright? Absolutely NOT. I own the physical book, he owns the copyright to the material. I can't publish it, present it, make derivatives, or anything within the control of copyright law, but he DOESN'T OWN THE COPY and CAN'T DEMAND THE COPY from me. Anything less than a clear distinction between those two ideas starts to really mess with the doctrine of first sale and other issues which are fundamental to operating a reasonably private, capatilistic society.
The result is that Yahoo! cannot do anything related to the exclusive control provided in copyright (such as releasing the e-mails) without the permission of the copyright holder. However, deletion or destruction of a copy - especially when explicitly declared in the terms of service - has NOTHING WHAT-SO-EVER to do with copyright law, because copyright law doesn't provide any limit on destruction of a copy.
Yahoo! has NOT claimed ownership of the resulting expressions in the text. It probably does claim ownership of the bits on its hard drives (since it DOES own the drives), and the right to destroy those bits in relation to the terms of service. Nothing in copyright law can prevent them from deleting the material if they so choose.
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
QUOTE: 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.
What? How can this be possible? How was it blocked? Email providers have started to build magic life detectors into their servers?
Occam's razor. You probably mistyped the password, or she had changed the password by then.
About burning the diary. That was just stupid, if you ask me. You'd have something really personal of her to keep and remind you of her. Something you could hold in your hands years from now and serve as a catalyzer to all the good memories. As a window to her soul -- in a way, you'd still have a tiny piece of her with you. Now it's gone in smoke. I know I'd have kept it and treasure it, like her memory would deserve.
Copyright is irelevent. Hypothetical, I run a mail service, where (as specified in the agreement signed when opening the, non transferrable, account), you give me a letter and I as a service, make a copies of the letter and send it to people you specify. Additionally, as another service, I allow you to examine, and make copies of, the letters you have given me. Now, if you die, your estate gets the copyrights to those letters, but the letters are mine, you gave them to me, copyright limits what I can do with them, but that doesn't mean the letters, as physical objects, are part of the estate, as they weren't yours even before you died, you had allready given them to me.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
In my opinion you make a good argument as to why Yahoo is in the wrong here. You decided to burn it because you were the person dealing with her things and that it was appropriate. But that is not what is happening here, Yahoo, a service provider, is deciding for you that you can't have access to her diary. An (probably poor) analogy would be if her landlord (assuming she rented) told you he had taken her diary and that you couldn't have access to it because it was her privacy. My personal feeling is you would have been pissed in such a situation, even knowing that you might burn it.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
>Yeah mom, to access my email which is on the same ....
>server as my web host, just ssh into port 20002.
>The username is "xxxx". Password? No, there's no
>password, you have to use a DSA certificate. It
>says in the man pages you can use '-i'
You know, if they had that, they'd have an easy time finding someone who could make sense of it. Much easier, at least, than what they'd have to deal with otherwise. When I said "access methods" I was speaking pretty broadly -- what I was thinking about was URLs, basic site navigation, or things that requierd specific software.
My mom wouldn't know what to do with it either, but I don't think it would take her more than a day to find someone who did. The most important part would be making it obvious that "this is how you get into my email" so that the importance of the info was obvious. Otherwise, all that technobabble would go right by most people, especially when dealing with a death in the family.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/