Next of kin vs. Yahoo!
31 Dec 2004 
very late at night 
Matt Winckler
Yahoo! is refusing to hand over the email account of a killed Marine to his family. This is in accordance with their privacy policy, which states that email accounts are non-transferable. The father is suing Yahoo! to get possession of the account’s contents, and has received vast grassroots support for his efforts. Yahoo! remains untouchable by pity–or is that unmovable from the contract it’s entered into with its customers?
I come down firmly on Yahoo!’s side in this issue, and here is why. Firstly, if Yahoo! felt it acceptable to violate their policies for one person, why should all of its other subscribers expect the company to uphold its policies in their case?
Secondly, what is it that the father wants to get out of his son’s email account so badly? The article above argues that accounts may have vital information to help families close out the deceased’s accounts and business and so forth, but that strikes me as a pathetic argument. If an email is the only place such information was stored, then the deceased deserves what they get. GMail advocates aside, email is a profoundly stupid place to archive any vital information.
Thirdly, and related to the second point, the father should already have any messages his son sent him, as well as any that he sent his son. Since when did it become his business to read all his son’s other mail? What of the people sending the Marine email all this time–don’t they have a certain expectation of privacy? Granted, everyone ought to think of email as being about as private as a postcard, but not everyone does. I wouldn’t want some third party reading all my mail to John Q. Marine just on a matter of principle, even if it weren’t on particularly private subjects.
Yahoo! ought to stand firm until a court orders them to do otherwise. Which one probably will.