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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."
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?
I think I heard mutterings of this a week ago or so, but it wasn't much. I really don't care since I've been wishing Yahoo would roll over and die for years, and I try to ignore them.
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
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!!!!
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.
Parents have no rights to my privacy unless willed to them after I'm 18.
Perhaps he wouldn't want mom and dad finding out about his boyfriend?
This sig is the express property of someone.
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
Well if he never emailed mother@isp.com then she can go suck a lemon.
Personally I don't see the big privacy issue. Yahoo [like hotmail and gmail] transfer your email from the client to their server via plaintext HTTP. Then it's sent through a dozen other boxes in plaintext, etc...
There is hardly any consideration of privacy there.
Not that I want people rummaging through my gmail account but I also don't work on the basis that my emails are private which is why I use GPG if I need to send private info.
I am teh SMRT!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I tend to grant Yahoo! the benefit of the doubt on this one. If the man had wanted the contents of his email box to be disclosed to his family, he would (or should) have made arrangements to do so.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Agreed. WTF do they want to read his mail for anyway?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
What are you going to do, hurt his feelings? He's dead. On the other hand it might give his family something to hold onto.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
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.
Well, that's why they make keystroke loggers.
I mean why wait for "permission".
Not his, but quite possibly the parents feelings.
After all, do they really want to hold on to their son's pictures from Abu Gharib or the like?
Sometimes it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
i believe you meant: "I swear, sometimes, I think I'm a fucking GENIUS."
Do dead people have a right to privacy? What happens to medical records and lawyer confidentiality after death? I'd imagine that the sanctity of the confessional would still be honoured, but that's a different basket of fish.
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/
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,
"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
Once you are dead, your next of kin (lets say your parents in this case) have a right to everything you owned UNLESS you had a Will stating otherwise. Your privacy becomes the property of the person getting all your shit.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
"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.
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.
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.
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
Personally I don't see the big privacy issue. Yahoo [like hotmail and gmail] transfer your email from the client to their server via plaintext HTTP. Then it's sent through a dozen other boxes in plaintext, etc... There is hardly any consideration of privacy there.
There is privacy if no on is reading the mail. There is no *security* as the mail is being transferred in plaintext, but security and privacy are not one and the same.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
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.
Off topic: but I can't wait to see what the future holds in regard to what is considered a "kid". I'll be 30 in another year, so hopefully I'll still be around to see some more stuff. I wonder if by the time I'm 90, 30 year-olds will be considered kids. The age keeps going up and up...
A modern day witchhunt.
The article mentions AOL and Hotmail, what does the Gmail service agreement state?
I want a gmail account. Can someone help me
"You wanna know what happened to your dog, Lil' Jimmy? He, uh, went to sleep. Yeah, that's it. He's gone to sleep for a really really long time."
That kind of dog?
Which is easier to view a written letter left laying around or something where you must go to a website and provide a user id and password.
thats was my point neither is really secure, but with email, at least no one can read it, because it's just sitting on the coffe table ( unless it was printed of course).
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
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?
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.
I'm not saying that this is the case here, but it could be. Fact as, as was stated by others: if he wanted his mails to be read by family or friends, he would have been the one to make those arrangements.
This means 2 things
- Since it wasn't a password that was easy to guess, it should be assumed that the son wanted it private
...
- The father is engaged in illegal activity (trying to hack another person's account)
...
Now for what's in the back of a LOT of people's minds - what if the father gets access to all the email and finds out something his son didn't want him to know - for example, that his son had a boyfriend? Do we really want to see this on Springer?Releasing the emails would be a violation of the contract, as well as of the rights of other people whose emails are there. There is NO upside to this.
I don't know what you are expecting but my experience from college taught me that just because you are
$YOURAGE GREATER THAN $ADULTAGE
You are not an "adult". Why else would they go binge drink just because "mommy ain't around no more" or other such fun "college" activities.
Not that I don't mind the good mixer or two but I don't consider "partying" to be an important thing in life [though judging by how my after college life is starting I probably should have].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Well, in concept, your shower-head has 'access' to your naked ass every day (assuming you have good hygiene). Do you consider that as invasive as a search at an airport?
You don't, I assume, because access by an uncomprehending machine with no memory is not the same as access by a person.
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
You may be, but we cannot require people to be "smart" in order to have basic privacy. Dumb people deserve privacy, too.
In a way the Yahoo agreement can be seen as a statement that you wouldn't want to leave these messages to your next of kin, afterall he did agree to it.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
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.
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.
"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?!?"
What kind of logic is that? By the same token, a hard-drive not only "reads" your emails, but also "owns" your email. For that matter, your processor, motherboard, and RAM also reads your emails. Wait a minute, do you think your browser is not parsing the HTML content of your web-based email? Do you think the router doesn't read your email when it's routed to you?
I think you're creating an emotive issue here when there isn't one.
Did they force him to become a customer?
He could have used another mail provider.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I don't think that it's necessarily a "double standard". When you sign up for a yahoo account you agree to a TOS, same with gmail. True, access is indeed access, but for one service you agree that the account is not transferrable, and in the other you agree to let big brother look over your mailing habits. Now, if yahoo had said no on this particular case, and yes on some other case then yes it would be a double standard.
There's also the fact that the emails in his inbox were probably not written by him, and probably not dead people.
Medical records and such are different as they don't "expose" other people's privacy through their release.
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.
From the Yahoo! Terms of Service:
"All your base are belong to us!"
Unfortunately, that just about covers it.
S
If the Yahoo agreement states that "this will not be passed to next of kin" or some such terms then yes this will be their way out.
However, the way the legal process works, I am sure that the attorney will argue the young marine most likely did not read the terms of service, and did not have a reasonable belief that this problem would occur, blah, blah, blah. Either way it is a hassle. The law should be defined.
I can understand why, though, Yahoo doesn't want to give this information. As a semi-free service, they do not want to have to deal with legal disputes- and in the case of yahoo and the size of their client base...this can be millions.
Hmm the scary thing, for me at least, many companies use yahoo to host their websites - and thusly use yahoo e-mail boxes. Now what happens if say the vice president dies. He is the only one with the pw to his email box but the data belogns to the company, is valuable to the company, etc.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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
So, a company decides:
"We agree that only one person has access to this critical info, and when he dies no one gets it. Don't make a contingency plan."
That sounds like a very good investment opportunity, after all, they probably make all their other business decisions equally intelligently.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
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.
> thats was my point neither is really secure, but with email, at least no one can read it, because it's just sitting on the coffe table ( unless it was printed of course).
If you are on a cable or dsl network, chances are your neighbor can just read it as easily while you are reading it..
Also, replace coffeetable with server, and 'someone' with 'cracker' or 'admin', and you have some more people who could, and in cases will read it.
If you want to keep a secret, don't tell ANYONE.
The exact order of inheritence (spouse, children, parents, siblings, etc) varies from state to state, but it's pretty safe to say that if you're an only child and don't have a spouse or children, your parents will have the legal right to take control of your possessions after you die unless you've explicitly willed it to someone else.
If you don't want any of your relatives to inherit your estate, you MUST have a will, and even then they can constest it. Blood relations count for A LOT in estate cases
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Your asking a C-level exec to understand the nuances of a techie issue? Man you work in a great company.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
true...if you live in a neighborhood of geeks or hackers. neither my family or friends or neighbors (even if they're on dsl or i have an unsecured wap) will have the slightest clue that they could read my email. so yea...my email sitting on a server is less likely to be read (by someone who knows or cares about what i do) than my letter on my coffee table. plus...it's more like...one of several million emails on a server versus one of 10 letters on my coffee table.
Better than Flickr - Manage, Share, Archive
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?
No, it should be assumed the son wanted it safe from the hordes of crackers on the internet, not necessarily from his own parents.
Should it also be assumed that a deceased relative didn't want you to inherit their house, because they put a heavy-duty lock on the front door?
That's debatable. As his son has died, he may now be the owner of that account. Last time I checked, it's still legal to "break-in" to your own property. This is complicated by the fact that Yahoo Mail is a service...
No, not remotely true. Since e-mail is clear-text, there is NO privacy. E-mail is just like post-cards.
If the son wanted to keep something secret, he wouldn't have sent it over the internet, in plain text, he would have encrypted it. In that case, yahoo would be handing over encrypted messages, which the parents wouldn't be able to read.
There are numerous upsides to this, and no downside, if handled properly.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Email provides more protection, than say snail mail which anyone can read
keep telling yourself that... and forget that your username and password is sent in plain text as well as the email contents.
I can and HAVE read others email before. That's how I coulght my Ex-wife sleeping around on me (Silly to use her email account at the ISP that I owned and ran over the networks I owned)
and have demonstrated this to the new "network security" guys they hired here that know nothing about computers or networking but were ex-cops. (shows us all that HR and corperate management are the morons we all suspected they were.)
I have demonstrated many things on how email is as insecure as posting your information on Billboards overlooking the interstate in 1 foot high letters.
US mail on the other hand is inside trusted, locked and guarded facilities until it hit's your houses "inbox" and then it's your choice to use a crap quality non-locking box.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?!
Releasing the emails would be a violation of the contract, as well as of the rights of other people whose emails are there
A little thought about the "privacy" of the senders of email. Sorry, you have whatever privacy I (as the recipient) decide you have. Once those emails hit my Inbox, they are my property. I can do anything I want. I can publish them, read them aloud, print them out and post them on kiosks, whatever. Even those little disclaimers that appear at the end of corporate eamils are most likely invalid. They appear at the end of the email so the user cannot make an informed decision until AFTER the email is read (so the whole "by reading this email you agree..." gets tossed out). Plus you have already received the email sent without entering a prior agreement as to the disposition the emails, thus relieving ANY onus or contractual obligation regarding the non-disclosure of the email's content.
Also, AFAIK unless there's a definite will, I believe all control of assets is legally given to the next-of-kin (wife, brother, son, father, etc..)
As far as whether there's something in there the father would be better off not knowing... Well, that's more of a judgement call than a legal reason to deny him access. Yes, there may be risks involved, but that should be up to the father as the de-facto owner of these emails.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
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.
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.
Now for what's in the back of a LOT of people's minds - what if the father gets access to all the email and finds out something his son didn't want him to know - for example, that his son had a boyfriend?
I'm getting a little tired of reading this same argument in half the comments on this article. When this man died, his heirs (in this case his parents) took control of all of his property. By your argument, that should not be allowed because they might find love letters from a boyfriend in his personal effects. That's no different than finding such an email on his personal computer, or finding it on Yahoo's servers. What it comes down to here is if those emails are the personal property of the deceased (something that will doubtless be argued by the family's lawyer in court), then the heirs should have the right to access them. Its up to the family to decide if they want to read them or not, and noone else. None of us can decide what is the correct way for his family to deal with what has happened-grieving is a very individual, and personal, process.
I lost my brother suddenly and without warning last summer. He didn't have a will-he was 24, and at that age most people don't think about things like wills and estates. They have what they hope is the prime years of their lives ahead of them, and its a cruel thing when someone dies young and that future slips away. We found and read many of his emails-we couldn't get to his Yahoo accounts, for the same reason as this soldier's family. We found jokes he and his friends had passed around, school related emails-and emails to, from, and about girls. It gave us some comfort to have those, it helped us deal with the pain of losing him and remind us that except for his last hour, his life was a good and mainly happy one.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Not to mention I have a lot more control over who comes into my home and could therefore see what's on my coffee table than I do over who sees what at any given webmail provider.
The Farewell Tour II
No, not remotely true. Since e-mail is clear-text, there is NO privacy. E-mail is just like post-cards.
However, it is currently stored only on Yahoo's servers, in a theoretically secure manner. Just because emails were sent to me in plaintext over the internet does not mean that you have a right to come into my house and look through my inbox. The only existing copy on the internet is in my mailbox and possibly the mailbox of the sender, nowhere else. I would assume, therefore, that the content is private, encrypted or not.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
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.
There is. It's considered privileged communication and neither the police nor the courts can compel a priest to divulge it.
I am not aware of any Protestant sect which practices Confession, so the issue wouldn't arise for them.
It can. You can have privileged communication with any priest of any faith; it can even be a private conversation with a Catholic priest outside of the confessional. All of it is protected.
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).
You could argue, however, that both snail-mail and emails are sent with the expectation of privacy. Yes, spooks can read your mail, and eavesdroppers could intercept your (non-encrypted) emails as well. But, you don't expect your thoughts to be broadcast around the country.
The difference comes from the fact that there is a 3rd party -- Yahoo -- involved in getting access to this email. If he had left his passwords to someone in the faimly, there would be implied permission to read his email.
Suppose that your uncle Dan dies, and leaves a bunch of letters locked in his desk drawer -- and Freda (his best friend) has the key. Is she obligated to give the key to Dan's family?
I don't know the answer to that, but then again IANAL...
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.
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:
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.
If you wrote me a letter, and I died, that letter would become the property of my estate, and my parents would get it. What makes you think that email should be treated differently?
The TOS state that the service stops upon death. So, even under your theory of inheritance, there is nothing to inherit, except a stopped service.
It's not a question of who owns the emails - if they even exist - but of who has "rights" to a service that specifically is halted upon death, and what those "rights" would be.
The simple answer - there is no legal reason to grant access, and there IS one (violation of the TOS if access is granted) NOT to grant access...
In addition, the TOS specifically excludes anyone who abuses the system (by, for example, trying to hack into an account). The parents have already violated Yahoo!s TOS and can legitimately be denied access to any and all Yahoo! services.
You assume that I'm for disallowing access to gmail to search your email for marketing info; you did agree to allow that when you signed-up for a gmail account.
More to the point, I find that type of access to be less important than giving a grieving family access to a dead son's last thoughts.
You don't find it any bit hypocritical that a media organization that is going out of its way to find out everything about you so they can SELL, SELL, SELL is going to deny access to "who you are" to your own family?
If anything, I would have hoped that access to family would be the easier thing to achieve and marketing research would need more permissions.
I know this isn't a popular view on this board (as evidenced by the responses/moderation of my original post). But, I feel the family of a dead loved one should have more sway in this situation than they are obviously getting. They *want* it for some reason... sheesh.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
They couldn't get in illegally, so now they're whining about trying to get in legally. They're just stupid hypocrites.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
This has already been discussed elsewhere in the thread, but I'll respond anyway. If the account is the property of the deceased, then the heirs now own the account. It is not yet illegal to hack your own account.
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.
"They're idiots. Fuck 'em" - a fine thing to write about parents who are grieving thier son who was a US soldier. What if I wrote "you're an idiot, fuck you" - see, it's not very nice, is it?
I stole this
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!"
I don't think it's in the least hypocritical for Google to scan emails for advertising but not automatically release addresses to next of kin because, again, we are talking about two fundamentally different meanings for 'access'.
We are, of course, assuming that Google would have the same policy as Yahoo. I can't see why it wouldn't.
The second issue, which I think is more surprising for a lot of people here, is that our email accounts apparently are not our property. It makes sense, but it's still a little shocking once your attention is called to that fact.
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
Yes, it can be both illegal and a violation of the TOS to hack into your own account. If I forget my password, and write a dictionary attack program to try to unlock my account, I am disrupting the network. Clear violation of the TOS, and possible criminal violation of laws regarding tampering with networks.
Who "owns" the account is not the issue. Yahoo! can ban them from all Yahoo! services (see below).
But first, for the sake of argument, let's move it into the physical world. How about a company car? I'm provided a company car, free of charge. I die. My next of kin have no "inheritable right" to be provided a company car.
More importantly, the parents have ALREADY violated Yahoo's TOS themselves, and provided Yahoo! with the right to terminate their access to any Yahoo! service, by trying to hack into the account.
Since they claim the same rights as the original account-holder, they are bound by the same agreement, which includes not trying to hack into accounts, etc. They're also bound by the provision that accounts terminate after 90 days of inactivity.
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.
When that didn't work, they then threatened to go legal, though they know they have no grounds.
What part of "They gave up their rights to access Yahoo!s services when they violated the TOS for using those services" don't you get?
I have no problem with them grieving for their son. I *DO* have a problem with them wanting to go grubbing around in email that is not theirs to look at in the first place.
If he wanted them to "inherit" it, he could have kept a copy of his password in his personal effects. If he wanted them to have ALL its' contents, he could have just cc'd them. So, do you have a copy of yur account names and passwords for your next-of-kin? That's your responsibility - not Yahoo!'s.
They also have zero right to his correspondence with 3rd parties, certainly no right to anything others wrote to him.
Maybe they should lay the blame where it really belongs - the Commander-in-Chief's getting the US involved in a war that Bush Senior had said would be ill-advised, no clear exit strategy, etc.
If the C-level execs don't understand enough to make sure that more than one person ALWAYS has access to all information then they will get cheated anyway because they won't be able to audit.
I also expect C-level execs to and understand things they agree to (or get, and listen to, expert advice).
If they can't do any better that that, they won't stay afloat in business long.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Exactly.
I see no reason that email, or any other electronic communications, accounts, blogs, etc, would not become a part of the deceased estate, and be treated just as anything else. How is this different than a regular mail box? Or a lockbox, or a P.O. box, or that safe hidden behind Aunt Erma's picture? It's not. Unless it was specifically willed otherwise, it should be a part of the estate and dealt with appropriately.
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
the downside to your idea that it gives the family something to hold on to may be something bad.
he may have had a second/dark side that he didn't want his family/friends to have access to.
and certainly a soldier dying on the battlefield doesn't need to have his legacy tarnished by some ill-advised email exchange.
RIP Sgt. and I hope your family finds peace.
Is it 5:30 yet?
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.
I wonder. What if he were exchanging emails with, I dunno, someone or some organization that might be embarrassing. Wouldn't he prefer that be kept private? Does his family really want to know the sordid details of his private life? Sure, it's not going to hurt his feelings now, but it can change the way his family perceives his life, and how they will remember him.
I can see arguments both for and against releasing his email. I think Yahoo is right to err on the side of caution, until the legality of the case can be sorted out.
Proverbs 21:19
I think if I wrote you a letter, and stored it in someone else's house, your family would have no right to force them to give it to you.
Biology trumps all. When you're old enough to start breeding brats of your own, it's bloody well time to grow up. That's how it's worked for the human race and all of its ancestors for 99% of our history; a little Puritan interlude, and the invention of the concept of the 'teenager' a half-century ago (mostly to eliminate competition in the workplace for another half-dozen years) does nothing to change this.
From what I can tell, maturity is hardly dependent on age. If it were there wouldn't be so many whining, selfish little piss-ants in the Boomer generation.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"Since it wasn't a password that was easy to guess, it should be assumed that the son wanted it private."
Option B: nobody with a yahoo email account has an easy to guess password, because anyone who did will have been cracked already, and lost control of the account.
I've seen people hit the "3 guesses per hour" limit on my account for days at a time, even when they had to type in a capttttcha for each guess. There aren't going to be any accounts with easy passwords left.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>No, not remotely true. Since e-mail is clear-text, there is NO privacy. E-mail is just like post-cards.
Please post all of you email somewhere. It's public and I want to read it.
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
I am not disagreeing with you. This, afaik, is the first time this issue has been brought up. Since there is no current legal ruling on it - yahoo will defend its stance. They really don't want to get involved in these legal matters - it's costly. They are hoping a ruling will be in there favor; if it isn't, then they will start having to deal with these problems in the future. God forbid if someone has multiple e-mail accounts "Hey Yahoo, find all the e-mail accounts for our deceased loved one John Smith"...
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
In other words you've decided to abandon the argument that they shouldn't be allowed to access the private property of their dead relative to argue they should be denied because of attempts to gain access to that property. I don't see how emails I personally own are in any way related to a vehicle owned by someone else I use as part of my job. One is my property, the other is someone elses, and obviously my heirs would have to return that property to its rightful owner after my death. This is about accessing the private property (in this case emails) of an individual.
I'd love to see Yahoo attempt to bring criminal charges against the family for attempting to hack their dead son's account. The would be walking into the full and rightful scorn of the public and press without a hope in hell of getting out of it, and any judge and jury worth their salt would laugh them out of court. This was not a malicious attempt to attack their network, this was an attempt to retrieve a piece of their dead son's life.
I know you probably think of this as a privacy advocasy case, and if their son was still alive it would be, but this is about the rights of the heirs to a dead man's property. Its not for us, or Yahoo, to say whether his family should be able to read his emails.
It might be too late. Once the story went public, Yahoo probably disabled the account.
In this case, possession is more than 9/10 of the law. It's in the contract. Yahoo! can delete the emails after 90 days. The parents have neither legal standing nor right to alter that agreement, as they were never a party to it.
The parents cannot show any cause or reason that the agreement between the deceased and Yahoo! was either illegal, against public morals, or the common good.
Their son is dead. Ranting against Yahoo! for agreeing to respect the contract between Yahoo! and their son is bullshit, and you know it.
Again, the "service" is not property. The terms of service specific. This includes that the service is automatically terminated after 90 days of inactivity and the emails deleted.
so why didn't they go the legal route first, instead of trying to hack into the account? Their son is dead. The email service is not theirs. They need to see a shrink. Get over it.So why don't you help these folks out?If i had the skillz,i'd just hack the kids account for them and send them the password and or email.Let us not forget--THE GUY DIED HORRIBLY IN A STUPID AND POINTLESS WAR--Let the poor family that had thie son brought back to them in a body bag have something to hold on to.If i had written a private email to this guy i would still let the parents have it because-THEY JUST BURIED THIER SON!For the love of all that is good let go back to showing a little respect and giving some leeway to those that have suffered the loss of a loved one.QUIT BEING ASSHOLES,YAHOO!THEY JUST BURIED THIER BOY YOU HEARTLESS BASTARDS!!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The "emails" are not private property - they're not property in any sense - they're bits stored on a server, which happens to be the property of Yahoo!
By extension, you're saying that there is no property in the digital realm, just the hardware to run it. That's contrary to the very concepts of copyright, and is the argument used by many to justify the copying of content on the internet (I'm not interested in the long winded arguments about copying music and movies, I've heard it for years and I'm done with the discussion). The heirs have every right to attempt to obtain what belonged to their son on Yahoo's servers, just as they have every right to his other property.
If I were to apply your arguments to other property, then it would be necessary to vet all letters and other "embarassing" personal effects from someone's property before giving to the heirs. That is not something we can do, and it is not something that should ever be considered, even in the name of privacy.
The email service is not theirs
This is not about the email service-they are not seeking the right to send and receive emails via their son's Yahoo mail account. They are seeking access to the emails he kept, which are property, not a service.
They need to see a shrink.
No, they need to go to court and get something done about this, which they are doing. This is a question about the rights of the heir, not an issue for privacy advocacy dogma. If their son was alive, this would be a completely different discussion, and unless accessing his email account was a matter of life and death, I would fiercly oppose their attempts.
He's dead, the equation has changed.
Get over it.
No. You're a dogmatic privacy advocate who has taken up a poorly chosen cause in this case. That's fine. What happens here is not your right to decide, any more than it is mine. They're going to court. They have a good chance of arguing that they should have access to those emails, just as they have a right to all of their son's property. Contrary to another of your comments, Yahoo isn't going to charge them with a crime for attempting to access his email, they know that's a losing cause that will turn public opinion against them, and could very well end up costing them financially in an investor backlash.
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
Actually I'm not at all sure if that's actually true.
I seem to remember that copyright is automatic even if not specifically claimed on a work. So unless that email was a work for hire...
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.
You criticise them for doing something without using the legal system, then you criticise them for using the legal system!
I stole this
There is. It's considered privileged communication and neither the police nor the courts can compel a priest to divulge it.
Yes, the priest can't be foced to divulge the information, but the question is, if a priest chooses to, is he breaking the law?
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.
The hypocrisy is in expecting others to obey the law when you don't.
BTW - they *still* haven't even filed for a T.R.O., so I guess that, even in the lawsuit-happy USofA they can't find an ambulance-chaser^Wlawyer to represent them in such a frivolous suit.
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.
What? If you mailed me a letter how sure could you be that I wouldn't show it to someone? Anything you send someone isn't guaranteed to be confidential.
Now if I took that letter and kept it in a locked safe and I died, that safe, along with all my property, would belong to my next of kin, and if they wanted to crack the safe and read whatever's in there that's their right. I don't see why yahoo is being so stupid about this.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The issue is about the privacy of those that sent the e-mail to him, not his own privacy. If you wish to argue that, be my guest, but do it on another thread...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's absolutely ridiculous. You are taking one single case, and assuming it must apply similarly to 6 billion other people as well.
I can say from my own experience, that my family members wouldn't have a clue what passwords I use. However, if I died unexpectedly, I personally would want them to be able to access my e-mail.
If you are the sole living relative to the home owner, you will get the house.
Now instead of sneaking around it, answer the question. Is difficulty of entry necessarily a sign that someone does not want the property inherited in the event of unexpected death?
If you take-over the payments, you certainly do. But this analogy of yours is so off-the-mark that it's pointless to argue with it.
A safe deposit box is a service, not property, as well. Should you be denied access to the property you inherited, because it's inside the safe deposit box?
The contents of the messages are property, even though not physical.
Okay, so e-mail is exactly like postcards, sent to a P.O. Box...
And this is off the topic anyhow. The point is, the people who sent the e-mail had no expectation of privacy, as anyone could have read it while it was being transfered.
I don't see the point in replying to the rest of your message... Straw-man after straw-man.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There has to be a formal transfer. Which means either, you pay it off completely, or you get your own financing - you are NOT entitled to continue their credit contract.