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I will be dead. I won't care whether anybody has any respect for me then.
I rendered my opinion. There is no requirement for anybody to agree.
Your disagreement is duly noted, and duly ignored. Again, I don't care!
Note to self: Send your son the excel file that has all the account user id/password info. Then call him and tell him the password to that file. And resend whenever you make a change. (wife already has this info)
Note to self: Send your son the excel file that has all the account user id/password info. Then call him and tell him the password to that file. And resend whenever you make a change. (wife already has this info)
Yup. My dad periodically gives me a dated sealed envelope with all of his and my mom's updated info in it (or that's what he says it is anyway lol). I keep them in our lockbox.
There was an article in the news about an elderly widow who's fighting Apple to get the password to her late husband's computer account, so that she can just play a game on it.
Should a deceased person's heirs have the right to "inherit" things like passwords and account information owned by corporations?
An executor usually gets the authority to get access to copies of traditional records like medical records. Corporations don't necessarily have to play by those rules, apparently. Should they?
Part of that way too longand boring "terms of service" disclosures inevitably says all the stuff you put on their servers belongs to them as soon as you do it. The elderly lady has no case.
Still, this might become a big deal later on when Millennials start getting old and dying off. It won't be long before we are creating whole virtual worlds online that attract users and even earn real world income (think "Second Life" but with graphics/experiences that beat today's best Hollywood visual effects). Some of those virtual places will be worth serious money when their creators die... so who will own them?
Living people have a right to all sorts of things dead people don't, because they don't benefit from them. Money. Property. Expression. And others.
When a person dies, someone or someones inherit their estate. That estate includes not just financial items, but information items. It is up to the heirs on how or if to disseminate such things, just like it is up to them to determine how or whether to disseminate financial items.
From a purely humanistic standpoint, too, we learn so much from knowing how others think, how they experienced life. Forcing the living to tell us all about it violates their ability to live that life. But unnecessarily shielding the rest of that knowledge from the rest of humanity after we're dead would be a great loss in a full understanding of the human experience. How many children, for example, feel they never really fully knew their parents until the parents died and the children are able to sort through old writings and letters and other personal information? That sort of thing can be hugely valuable to the living.
If the possessions on which the information was accessed or stored was purchased with funds from a joint account and no will said that information should not be shared, it's fair game. That doesn't mean a service that claims to own access rights has to allow a loved one access after death.
if she didnt have the password while he was alive she doesnt deserve it now.
have some respect for the dead.
I disagree. There may be financial things tied to the accounts. I have a games account that is on automatic renewal that dh wouldn't know about. My log in for the bank has access to our daughter's account. My log on to our email carrier has control of all the accounts. Ditto for our cell phone carrier. The bills are billed to his bank account log on which interestingly HE doesn't know. I pay the bills. I know he has subscriptions that I know nothing about. I would expect that he's deleted anything he'd be worried about my seeing and since he's dead I don't think he's going to care if I do see it.
It's not that dh and I don't tell each other our passwords. It's that we don't memorize each other's passwords. It only took me about 15 minutes to figure his out when my lawyer asked me to try back when we almost divorced but there's no guarantee after he dies that I'll figure them out before locking the account out.
My vote would be that the heir gets the passwords. Honestly, if I really wanted to keep something secret after I died I'd have an entire account dh knew nothing about. I wouldn't use my normal email account.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 02-28-2016 at 07:41 AM..
I read up on this woman, 72, who did eventually get help from Apple to access the account, and I think it was justified. It was her tablet, just on his account because he was the one who set it up for her. There were games, etc. on the tablet that were bought for her use. She made a good point, in that other purchases were transferred to her when her husband died, so why not the paid contents of an iPad?
I disagree with the argument that if her late husband had intended her to have his passwords, he would have given or willed them to her. He could have died unexpectedly and people don't often think about things like that. If they shared most everything else, I don't see why it should be a problem.
I do believe that the dead should have privacy rights but not for the sake of the deceased, necessarily. Access to information by a party outside the family should certainly be very limited. A dead person's loved ones shouldn't have to be exposed to potentially unsavoury truths about the deceased while they are grieving unless it's a consequence of their own efforts (and there's no time limit on a person's grief). But if the immediate next of kin wants access to something, I think it should be considered and in most cases, permitted.
This underscores the need for laws to catch up to technology. I've heard of cases like this before, and it's always a battle.
As it happens, there are services like https://afterword.cc/ that allow people to pre-arrange posthumous messages to go out to loved ones through a trustee, which can include things like passwords. There are also sites that will send messages automatically if the account holder doesn't log in every X number of weeks. But a man in his 70s isn't likely to even know such things exist.
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