What Happens to Your Email and Social Networking Accounts When You Die - Case Study Example

Who gets to see the e-mail of the deceased? After the death of Justin Ellsworth, a young Marine who was killed in the line of duty, his parents put in a request to obtain all of his personal belongings, which included any and all e-mail correspondences. As this went against the e-mail provider’s term of agreement and privacy, they denied the parents the opportunity to come into possession of these documents. Feeling as though they had a right to them, Ellsworth’s parents took the e-mail provider to court. Ellsworth’s parents won the case and the e-mail provider had no choice but to hand over the contents of the e-mail account (Leach, 2005). The case involving Ellsworth’s personal e-mails and his parents’ desire to have all of his personal belongings, and the e-mail provider being forced to surrender the information to access the account, sparked a lot of controversy amongst avid Internet and e-mail users. Many of them feel that regardless of what else is handed over to the parents or other family members in the aftermath of someone’s death, unless otherwise requested by the deceased in a will, the information to access their e-mail account is to remain protected by the privacy policy of the e-mail provider. Though the e-mail provider in the case of John Ellsworth refused to surrender the information until a judge demanded it, the provider still abides by their privacy policy, which is that nobody is entitled to gain access to a personal e-mail account unless noted by the owner. On a different side of the argument, it is believed that while Ellsworth’s family were entitled to the belongings that he had while in the military, his e-mail correspondences, whether or not written while he was on his tour of duty, were not part of the agreement. A spokesperson with the Marines stated that, “Each Marine gets a crate or large boxes to pack stuff in. Whatever’s in there gets sent back. Period (Hu, 2004).” If handwritten letters were placed in these boxes, Ellsworth’s parents would have gotten them. E-mails, however, were a different story entirely. The nature of e-mails are private and can often be intimate or embarrassing, articles that most people do not want their family members reading. If they had wanted their family members to know the contents of the e-mails, they would have sent them the same message. Since e-mails are harder to gain access to as opposed to handwritten letters, it can be assumed that the e-mails often contain more sensitive information. Though it is requested that if people want their e-mails read after they have died that they should make a note of it in their will or other legal document that can be used to obtain the account’s information, not only does this become difficult for people that are unaware of a chance of them dying, but many of them do not take into consideration that others may have an interest into the information that their e-mails contain. The answer to whether or not the e-mail provider should have been forced to hand over the information to Justin Ellsworth account is a simple no. If Ellsworth had not told his family what he was telling others in his e-mail, then the same could probably be said for him after his death. If what he told others did not concern his family members, then they simply wouldn’t have been told about it. There should only be certain circumstances that would allow family members to have access to persona e-mail accounts, such as if they have firm belief that the e-mails contain information regarding the death of their relative, or if that person had been involved in a crime prior to their death and they think that the e-mails contain information to help investigators. Furthermore, as Ellsworth had been a legal adult at the time of his death, his parents had no right to gain access to his personal e-mail (Bennett, 1999). Had Ellsworth been a minor, there would have been little to no battle involved in accessing his e-mail account, though the e-mail provider probably would have still put up a fight on the behalf of upholding their deceased user’s privacy. Ellsworth private adult life was nobody’s business but his own, dead or alive. His parents had every right to try to get as many belongings back that belonged to Ellsworth, but the e-mail provider did not have the right to go against their privacy policy, even after a court ruled against them. Since this debate over privacy policies and the obtainment of the deceased’s e-mails, many e-mail providers and social networking sites have changed their privacy policy to implement the possibility of relatives seeking access to the accounts of the deceased. While some allow access with proof of relation by a relative, there are others, such as Facebook or Myspace, which gives the next of kin permission to either turn the page into a memorial or have it deleted entirely (Cola, 2009). E-mail providers, such as Yahoo, the provider that Ellsworth was using, does not allow anybody access to e-mail accounts. They truly were forced to surrender the account information, going against a privacy policy that they had spent years reinforcing and promising to users. Even after the incident involving Ellsworth’s parents, Yahoo has since continued to uphold their stance on their privacy policy. Yahoo should not have been forced to turn over Justin Ellsworth’s e-mails to his parents, though there was little that could have been done after the court ruled in favor of the Ellsworths. Thus, it is suggested that frequent users of the Internet and e-mail make note of whether or not they want their e-mail accessed after they have died, if the want their messages to go to a specific person, or if they want the account deleted entirely. Rules were not only breached due to a court order, but privacy was wrongfully invaded. References Bennett, C.J. (1999). Visions of privacy: Policy choices for the digital age. Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. Cola, J. (2009). What happens to your email and social networking accounts when you die? Retrieved from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-happens-to-your-email-and-social-networking-sites-when-you-die/ Hu, J. (2004). Yahoo denies family access to dead Marine’s e-mail. Retrieved from http:// news.cnet.com/Yahoo-denies-family-access-to-dead-marines-e-mail/2100-1038_3-5500057.html Leach, S.L. (2005, May 2). Who get to see the e-mail of the deceased? The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0502/p12s02-usju.html Read More