What Happens to Your Email When You're Dead? June 1, 2005
After you are dead and gone from this world what happens to
your email, your blogs, your social networking accounts?
If it is hosted on a free account it might just sit there for a
very long time before eventually being removed by the host. Does
anyone else have the password besides you? Will your email provider
turn your emails over to a relative? Is that what you would
want to happen? The answer is somewhat unclear. The Mercury News
has an article on the topic that answers a few questions.
AOL has assigned a full-time person to help with these kinds of
questions:
America Online, with 28 million members, has assigned a full-time
employee to handle next-of-kin requests. Before releasing account
information, the company requires a copy of the death certificate
and documentation proving the person requesting the e-mail information
is the legal beneficiary or the estate representative, said America
Online spokesman Nicholas Graham.
MSN's Hotmail will provide a disk with data after it verifies the relatives
are related to the deceased.
MSN Hotmail will provide account contents on CDs or floppy disks to
relatives of deceased members after it verifies the legitimacy of the
request, said Brooke Richardson, MSN lead product manager, in a statement.
``We have tried to institute a policy that is very focused on
privacy, but at the same time honors the requests of bereaved
family members.''
And MercuryNews.com said Yahoo would not comment on its policy.
However, in another situation Yahoo terminates email accounts
if a user dies and won't turn over the emails without a court order.
After Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth of Michigan was killed Nov. 13 while
inspecting a bomb in Iraq, his father, John Ellsworth, wanted access to
his son's Yahoo email account. But Yahoo, whose policy is to terminate
email accounts upon a user's death, would not give him the material
until a probate judge ordered the Sunnyvale company to do so.
Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco
non-profit that often gets involved in digital-privacy issues, said
it's difficult to find the right balance between personal privacy and
a family's desire to get all of a loved one's possessions.
``We are sympathetic to the pain families go through,'' he said. ``On
the other hand, there are a lot of things people want to keep private
from their close relatives. You need to have some way to do that.''
