Blog 4: Internet Privacy

Anytime you post something online, it stays there. Even if it's the littlest thing about where you were and what you were doing, to signing up to a website with your email address, it's permanently burned on the internet. No matter how much you try to get rid of it, there will always be a foot print available on the servers hidden deep within cyberspace. Even though it's up there for anyone to see, it's still your property. When you accept various terms and conditions to a website, you're signing a contract basically saying that what you post is yours. But what about when you die?

In this article, 21-year-old college student Ben Stassen committed suicide and his parents want to find out why. This ongoing battle between the parents and Facebook is trying to determine whether the Stassens should have access to his account. The court order says that "the Stassens are the heirs to their son’s estate and are entitled to any of his assets, possessions or records, including the contents of his Facebook account." This, however, brings up the debate on how online companies can honor their contracts with users to continue to protect their privacy.

One of the main problems that goes along with that is that no one knows if the user wants their family to have access unless it's written in a will. I don't really think people think about writing "I allow my family to have the rights to my Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Tumblr accounts and all content contained in them when I die."It's just not something that would come to the first thought. Once property is digitized, it's really hard to grasp it because it's not physical. It hard to determine if something digital can even be property. Even if a Facebook could be considered property that can be inherited to family, there's tons of liability issues if the family was lying about the death or if the company is legally unable to disclose any information without the consent of the customer, etc.

Social networking sites are still so young that they probably didn't take death into account when writing up their terms and conditions. Most states don't even have laws regarding online account information to refer to. Online companies should consider adding a clause to the contract, at least, discussing matters of death and needing the family to provide a death certificate or written will (if the user has one) so that courts don't have to get involved. However, that does still present the problem if the user wants their family to get hold of it in the first place. The article states that the federal government is prompting the public to write a social media will. Guess we should all get started.