Have you no sense of privacy, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of privacy? – Some of us who keep online journals spend some time thinking about what is and is not appropriate to publish. Others, apparently, do not.
Aside
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Hmm, and another privacy issue, what do you think of this one: http://www.detnews.com/2004/technology/0412/21/A01-38621.htm
I think the family is acting silly. Yahoo is being suprisingly good about preserving user privacy. Email is not something to be trifled with, and you shouldn’t be releasing someone’s private correspondance to anyone, no matter how much of a sob story they have to tell and how often they call to complain to your poor support people. If the family wants the email, they can go to court and attempt to have it classified as personal effects, as was suggested in the story. They shouldn’t criticize front line support people for following a logical and legal policy.
Their silly arguments have no basis in reality. How would he be in a position to write and store emails but not send them, when he is using a webmail account? He has to have access to the web to write them, the only reason he wouldn’t be sending them is if they weren’t yet meant to be sent. If he wanted his family to see all of his personal correspondance, he could have given them the password or forwarded it all on, but he didn’t. Arguments can be made about the amount of time he had, his level of technical knowledge, and the like, but if we made exceptions every time someone was “too busy” or not technically inclined, we would be carving out all kinds of strange legal exceptions that are pretty much unprovable. Yahoo is in the right. Its sad that the soldier died with email in his account, but lots of people die with email in their accounts. This isn’t an uncommon and novel occurance. And there is another issue here — it isn’t just emails he has written, it is all the emails that have been written *to* him, and the authors of those emails have a right to privacy as well. If what the family is saying is true, that he had correspondance with family and friends all over the world, then surely most of those people would still have copies of the correspondance, and they should be contacted by the family to see what they want to divulge.