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This fascinating article explains the importance of leaving your critical information in a safe place to be picked up by your loved ones after you have passed away. However, there is a new twist. We are all aware of how important it is to communicate bank account numbers, life insurance policy numbers and other key messages, but what about all of your passwords for email accounts, PayPal accounts and other online information? Using the MyMessages™ service at PartingWishes.com is an ideal way to document this kind of information which should not be included in your Will, as it is a legal document that would have to be updated, signed and witnessed every time a change is made. When loved ones do not have access to this information, a number of issues can arise... Digital Inheritance Raises Legal QuestionsJanuary 5, 2005 NEW YORK (AP) -- As more of our personal lives go digital, family members, estate attorneys and online service providers are increasingly grappling with what happens to those information bits when their owners die. Sometimes, the question involves e-mail sitting on a distant server; other times, it's about the photos or financial records stored on a password-protected computer. This week, a Michigan man publicized his struggle to access the Yahoo e-mail account belonging to his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Justin M. Ellsworth, 20, who was killed November 13 in Iraq. Though Yahoo's policies state that accounts "terminate upon your death," John Ellsworth said his son would have wanted to give him access. "He was wanting to forward his e-mail from strangers," Ellsworth said. "They were letters of encouragement. He said all their support kept him motivated. We've talked back and forth about how we were going to print them out and put them in a scrapbook." To release those messages in such circumstances, Yahoo said, would violate the privacy rights of the deceased and those with whom they've corresponded. "The commitment we've
made to every person who signs-up for a Yahoo! Mail account is to treat
their email as a private communication and to treat the content of their
messages as confidential," spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement. AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company gets dozens of such requests a day and has a separate fax number, mailing address and full-time service representative devoted to fulfillment. Nonetheless, some privacy advocates question whether that's a good approach. "People might decide
what they want family members to see or keep secret sometimes for family
harmony reasons," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law
professor who served as former President Bill Clinton's chief privacy
counselor. "They may know secrets of other family members that they hold
in confidence: The sister had an abortion; the father had a first
marriage." Rather than maintaining an either-or policy, perhaps service providers could ask users when they sign up whether they'd like e-mail disclosed upon death, said Jason Catlett, president of the privacy-rights group Junkbusters Corp. "If you put money into an IRA (individual retirement account) or a mutual fund, they will ask you for the next of kin," Catlett said. But Graham said cell phone providers and fitness centers don't make similar requests, and doing so with Internet service "is simply a turnoff and it's not necessary. We already have a process that works quite well and quite responsibly." For now, such disputes are rare, and most struggles for access involve family members who need to obtain financial records on a computer, said Bob Weiss, president of Password Crackers Inc., a Maryland company that recovers lost passwords. Less than 2 percent of Weiss's business involves relatives of the deceased, he said. Still, "as more of our lives go online, hosted faraway, we will want to think carefully about the disposition of those bits," said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Decades of laws and court decisions already guide physical possessions, especially when there is no will. What makes online assets different is the fact that they often involve some service contract with an outside company, said R. Michael Daniel, an estates attorney in Pittsburgh. The easiest approach, Internet scholars say, is simply to leave behind a password. "I think this (Yahoo) case will be helpful to people who are thinking about issues not only of inheritance but planning," said Jonathan I. Ezor, a professor of law and technology at Touro Law Center in Huntington, New York. "When one family member tells another where the important paperwork is, the will, safe deposit box key, etc., the list of passwords is going to be added to that."
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