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Digital Afterlife: What Happens To Your Online Accounts When You Die? - Family - Nairaland

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Digital Afterlife: What Happens To Your Online Accounts When You Die? by Kxy(m): 5:09pm On Jun 01, 2012
When Helen and Jay Stassen’s 21-
year-old son, Benjamin, committed
suicide 19 months ago, he did not
leave a note. If it had been 20 years ago, the
Stassens might have looked through
diaries, letters or other personal items
in an attempt to find clues as to why
he decided to end his life. These days,
however, young people tend not to keep things on paper; instead, their
most intimate thoughts are likely to be
online – in emails, social media posts
and personal blogs.
So that’s where the Stassens went
searching. They found themselves
engaged in a conflict with Facebook
and Google as they hunted for
answers about their son’s death and
the companies sought to honor their contracts with their users. “We are reeling with the reality of
being parents who not only have our
son who has died, but a very difficult
death on top of it which is not
anything we ever saw coming, which
has added to our desire to really want to know why,” said Helen Stassen
from her home in Prescott, Wis. The Stassens say that Benjamin, a
college student, had hoped to be an
entrepreneur one day and was a
health food enthusiast who loved to
play the drums and practice yoga. To
keep his memory alive, they built a free library at a park near their home
and their extended family helped get a
bench named for him near the
Mississippi River. “Those have been experiences that
have helped and have healed in tiny
ways that are a contrast to the fight
that we’ve been in,” Helen Stassen
said. The Stassen family is one of a
growing number of families
battling online companies to gain
access to a deceased loved one’s
digital assets. Digital assets include email, social
media accounts, digital photos
and online banking accounts and
records. The Stassens think
Benjamin’s online life might
provide a clue into their son’s last days and as the heirs of his estate,
they feel they have a right to get
access to his accounts. “Social media is a major way 21-year-
olds interact these days,” Jay Stassen
said. “We thought maybe this could
bring us some understanding, maybe
some peace. We didn’t know, but we
felt it was important to try to understand.” A local judge recently granted the
family a court order directing
Facebook to give the Stassen family
access to their son’s account. The
court order says that the Stassens are
the heirs to their son’s estate and are entitled to any of his assets,
possessions or records, including the
contents of his Facebook account. Emails provided by the family show
that Facebook has received the court
order and it’s currently in their legal
department. Legally, Facebook can
appeal the court order or comply with
it. When asked about the Stassen family’s court order, a Facebook
spokesperson said that the company
does not comment on specific cases. Legal experts said that court orders
can trump user agreements. Online
companies’ user agreements are
contracts with the user that usually
guarantee privacy and prohibit or limit
account access to others beside the user. “If Facebook is doing business in a
jurisdiction and the court orders them
to do something, they pretty much
have to do it or face the penalty. If
they don’t follow a court order, they
can be held in contempt of court,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio
State University. Swire, who served as Chief Counselor
for Privacy in President Bill Clinton’s
administration and as an adviser to
President Barack Obama on privacy
issues, said that online companies face
a “patchwork of state laws” and are usually cautious when it comes to
granting access to a deceased user’s
account. What happens to your Facebook account when you die? “What happens if a 21-year-old had a
safe deposit box at the bank, the
answer is the safe deposit box
belongs to his estate and whoever
controls the estate gets to open the
box,” Swire said. “In the physical world, it’s easy to tell if it’s someone’s
parents or child who has the safe
deposit key, it’s trickier for Facebook
and Google. Some evil prankster
might pretend that a person is dead
and try to take control of the account, so the online companies are
understandably careful before they
turn over the account to someone
who says they run the estate.” Online companies such as Facebook
say they are concerned with honoring
their contracts with users which
require them to protect their users’
privacy. It is possible that a deceased
user may not have intended for his online accounts to be accessed by his
loved ones after he died. “I think it’s a good idea for sites not to
have a blanket policy to hand this stuff
over to survivors. This information is
private and you assume that it’s
private, you assume that your
Facebook account is private, you assume that your email account is
private,” said Rebecca Jeschke of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital
civil liberties group. Jeschke said that the problem is that
people often don’t know what their
deceased loved one’s wanted to
happen to their online accounts. “What's really important is that your
survivors know what it is that you
want, to say to your spouse and
parents, ‘No, you can't read my email
after I die or yes, I want you to.’ I don't
think I'm the only person that would be uncomfortable with the idea of
someone reading my email after I
pass,” Jeschke said. Naomi Cahn,a law professor at George
Washington University, said that there
is “almost no binding legal precedent
out there” when it comes to digital
assets. “It’s a concern of internet service
providers being caught between
privacy and the meaning of their
contracts and being faced with a court
order to which there could be quite
severe penalties if they don’t comply with it. It’s something that lawyers,
state legislatures, hopefully the federal
government, hopefully the internet
service providers are all starting to
think more about as these issues
become common,” Cahn said. Are digital assets part of your estate? Cahn said that current laws have yet to
catch up with the digital age, leaving
families like the Stassens in a
frustrating limbo. “When somebody dies, the person
who is responsible for taking care of
the individual’s asset is supposed to
be complying with what the individual
wanted and protecting the individual,”
Cahn said. “Because so many people have not thought about this, we don’t
know what the person actually
wanted...we can all imagine what’s in
internet accounts. There may certainly
be cases where the person who died
would not have wanted anyone to get anywhere near the person’s account.” Only five states currently have estate
laws that include digital assets --
Connecticut, Rhode Island, Oklahoma,
Indiana and Idaho – and the laws vary
among them. Some states’ statutes, for
instance, just relate to email, with only Oklahoma and Idaho clearly including
social networking and blogging as
part of an estate. “Legally it is unclear exactly what you
can do in the 45 states -- and
Washington, D.C. -- that do not have
these laws that address this situation,”
Cahn said. “Even in those states where
there are laws, we’re still in the process of testing how those laws
operate. They don’t cover all Internet
accounts and the laws are new
enough that they’re just in the process
of being worked out.” Cahn said that most people don’t think
about what will happen to their online
accounts when they die, but if they
did, they would likely feel differently
about different sorts of online
accounts. “Some of the ones that we expect to
be passed on, like getting access to
online bank account statements,
doing online bill paying, those
probably we would expect others to
be able to take control over. Many of us probably think that once we die,
our Facebook accounts should either
be memorialized [left up for only
friends to see] or deleted entirely,”
Cahn said. Internet companies such as Google,
Yahoo and Facebook have taken the
position that the user probably
intended for the contents of his or her
account to remain private and crafted
user agreements to reflect this, Cahn said. “They do assume that the user wants
privacy, there’s all kinds of advice on
passwords and password strength to
make sure that there’ s no
unauthorized use,” Cahn said. “One of
the reasons we have passwords on our accounts, one of the reasons we
get so outraged when there’s a
hacking is we have certain
expectations of privacy when we
open accounts.” There also are liability issues. Some
states prohibit internet companies
from disclosing information without
the permission of the customer. With
no clear definition of digital assets in
most states, the companies then look to their user agreements and the laws
of individual states when a user dies. “Right now it’s kind of the Wild West in
most states. The statutes don’t refer to
any kind of digital asset or account,”
said attorney Suzanne Walsh, who
specializes in wills and estates. Walsh is a commissioner to the
Uniform Law Commission and chairs a
committee that’s been formed to
consider drafting a uniform law on
digital assets that states could adopt. Gene Hennig, one of Minnesota’s
commissioners to the Uniform Law
Commission, said that a court order is
one of the few options families have in
obtaining access to a loved one’s
online account. “You’ve got to hire lawyers. It’s time-
consuming. Some people may go to
all that trouble and it took forever to
get the order and by the time they got
it, the stuff had been destroyed. It’s
just an unworkable and very inefficient way of doing things,”
Hennig said. Family fighting Facebook: ‘We’ll be patient, but persistent’ The Stassens, an attorney and
librarian, are fortunate in that their
professional skills are there to help
them navigate the terrain of digital
assets. In addition, they’ve connected
with other families engaged in similar battles and lobbied their congressman
for help. In the process, they’ve also
obtained two court orders: one
directed at Google and another at
Facebook. “Many people don’t have that
knowledge, don’t have that
experience and unless they have the
financial means to hire an attorney to
do this for them, they are very likely to
feel stuck and not know what to do,” Jay Stassen said. After submitting a court order to
Google in September of last year, they
received the contents of Benjamin’s
Gmail account, but they are still
working to recover access to
Benjamin’s Facebook account. In April, they obtained a court order directing
Facebook to give them access to
Benjamin’s account. “We’ll be patient, but persistent,” Helen
Stassen said. The Stassen family said that they plan
to keep private any information they
find from their son’s online accounts. A spokesperson for Facebook said
that their policies do not allow access
to a dead user’s account. “For privacy reasons, we do not allow
others to access a deceased user’s
account,” a Facebook spokesperson
told NBC News. In addition, the
spokesperson said, the company's
policy prohibits them from commenting on the Stassen family's
case or any other specific cases. Facebook has two options for a dead
user’s account, the spokesperson said.
The first allows an account to be
memorialized, which leaves the profile
up so that friends and family can leave
posts in remembrance, but restricts the profile and associated content to the
Facebook "friends" that the deceased
had while alive, the spokesperson
said. A proof of death must be
provided for an account to be
memorialized. In some instances, Facebook allows family members to
have an account deactivated. Other companies have different
policies regarding a deceased
person’s online account. According to
Google’s web site, in rare cases, they
may provide the content of a deceased
person’s account to an authorized representative of the person.
Meanwhile, Yahoo says on its site that
all accounts are non-transferable and
it will delete an account when they
receive a death certificate. The Stassen family, though, say they
don't want to memorialize or
deactivate their son’s Facebook
account until they have seen the full
contents. The only way they’ve been
able to see the public part of their son’s page is because he and his
brother, Peter, were friends on
Facebook. Benjamin’s Facebook profile shows a
smiling young man with photos
showing him skiing with his family
and enjoying a beer with his brother,
Peter. Peter Stassen said that it’s been a
struggle to watch his parents try to
obtain access to Benjamin’s account. “It’s hard to fully reconcile how I feel
about Facebook now,” said Peter
Stassen, Benjamin’s brother. “None of
the people on the Facebook side seem
to have any realization that my parents
are people, that they’re dealing with emotions and that they’re not just an
account.” Facebook’s policy prohibits them from
commenting on the Stassen family’s
case or any other specific cases, the
spokesperson said. “I think Facebook has to understand
that when they push sharing of data,
open sharing of data, they also have
an obligation not only to be fair with
the account owner during their
lifetime, they have an obligation to be fair with the account owner after
they’ve died,” Jay Stassen said. How you can protect your digital assets The growing murkiness over digital
assets recently prompted the federal
government to post a blog encouraging people to create social
media wills. And Professor Cahn said that people
should discuss their online accounts
with their loved ones and have a frank
conversation about what they want to
remain online, what they want to be
deleted and what they want their loved ones to have access to. “We’re in an era of uncertainty,” Cahn
said. “You can certainly tell your loved
ones what you want to have happen.
What you have online that’s not
private, you can set up a joint
account.” Cahn said couples should consider
joint online bank accounts, for
example. In addition, she said, people
can include digital assets in their wills,
but warns that wills eventually
become public documents and that if you list passwords on the will, those
will become accessible to the public. A series of companies have also
sprouted up, such as Entrustet and
Legacy Locker, that allow you to come
up with a plan for the life of your
online accounts after you’re gone,
Cahn said. “As a society, we value the privacy of
our online account and we want
internet service providers to protect
our privacy and that means not giving
others access. If we thought about it,
we might think differently after we die,” Cahn said.
www.rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/01/11995859-digital-afterlife-what-happens-to-your-online-accounts-when-you-die?lite
Re: Digital Afterlife: What Happens To Your Online Accounts When You Die? by Bawss1(m): 12:41am On Jun 02, 2012
I don't want anyone looking at my digital accounts when I'm gone. It should be left to die with me.

This is just another form of not letting go which unfortunately many people are guilty of. Holding on to a deceased persons property whether real or virtual for the purpose of solace is, when properly considered, unhealthy. The death of a loved one, however painful, should be seen as the closing of a cycle. That cycle should be allowed to close completely if any progress is to be achieved.

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