Internet – Text
Check unknown vocabulary before you read the text:
Assets – property owned by a person
Worth – in value of
Turn into – to change
Revoke – to annul
Litigation – the process of bringing a legal action in court
Bereaved – suffering the loss of a loved one
Deceased – dead
Snoop – to watch secretly
Will – a testament
Provision – a condition
Nascent – coming into existence
Data after death
Digital assets may include software, websites, downloaded content, online gaming identities, social-media accounts and even e-mails. In Britain alone, holdings of digital music may be worth over £9 billion ($14 billion). A fifth of respondents to a Chinese local-newspaper survey said they had over 5,000 yuan ($790) of digital property. And value does not lie only in money. Anyone with children under 14 years old probably has two prints of them and the rest are in online galleries.
Service providers have different rules – and few state them clearly in their terms and conditions. Many give users a personal right to use an account, but nobody else, even after death. Facebook allows relatives to close an account or turn it into a memorial page. Gmail (run by Google) will provide copies of e-mails to an executor. Music downloaded via iTunes is held under a licence which can be revoked on death. Apple declined to comment on the record on this or other policies. All e-mail and data on its iCloud service are deleted upon the death of the owner.
This has led to litigation in America. In 2004, the family of Justin Ellsworth, a marine killed in Iraq, took Yahoo! to court in Michigan to get copies of his e-mails. In 2010, a court in Oregon ruled that another bereaved American mother could use her dead son's password to enter his Facebook account for a short period. Now five American states have enacted laws giving executors control over the social-networking profiles of deceased users.
But this raises the subject of privacy. Passing music on is one thing; not everyone may want their relatives snooping on their e-mails. Colin Pearson, a London-based lawyer, says access should come only with an explicit provision in a will.
Such clearly expressed wishes may help. An internet law expert in New Delhi, Gurpreet Singh, has already seen a few cases of wills including digital estates. “People are slowly realising the value,” he says. A nascent industry is emerging to simplify the process. Entrustet, newly acquired by a Swiss competitor, SecureSafe, says it has 10,000 clients. It safeguards their passwords, and a list of who can access what when they die.
But laws, wills and password safes may clash with the providers' terms of service, especially when the executor is in one country and the data in another. Headaches for the living—and lots of lovely work for lawyers.
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