I’m sure most of you have heard this story by now, but in case you haven’t the main point is that the family of a marine that was killed in Iraq is trying to get Yahoo to give them the password to their dead son’s account, for the sake of basically getting his “last words”. They are trying several angles, but Yahoo’s position looks pretty solid.
Here’s why I support Yahoo on this:
- If the son wanted his parents to have access to the account, he could have given them the password himself. It’s not like he didn’t know he was going into a dangerous situation, so if that’s what he wanted, he should have taken care of it.
- As for e-mail communications with the family, doesn’t the family have their own copies in their own accounts? Which leads to…
- Since they would already have the email correspondence that they were a part of, the only thing they would need the password for would be to read conversations that they were not originally involved in. That just doesn’t make sense to me. How about the privacy of those other parties, who were communicating only with the son? Presumably everyone he e-mailed is still alive (and probably aware of the situation by now), and they can offer up those e-mails on their own, *if* they want to.
2 Comments
what about the fact that email is not encrypted, therefore isn’t really private anyways?
I agree that unencrypted e-mail isn’t really secure (I’ll have to start a new post on this one), but that’s no excuse for yahoo to throw their hands up and make the info available without the consent of either party (msg sender & recipient)
It would be like google saying ‘hey, since email isn’t really secure anyway, we’re going to make gmail user messages available for public search’
knowing so much personal info about their son, i’m surprised they haven’t already guessed his pw; unless he actually chose a good one. But again, i don’t see their need to see messages that weren’t meant to be seen by them. if their son wanted to include them in the conversations, he could have.
Also, the yahoo tos (which the son agreed to) clearly state that in these circumstances, the account is not opened up.
In any event, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, on both sides.