Who inherits a selfie? States seek to fill privacy law gaps
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — When a loved one dies, laws cover how their houses, cars and other property are passed on to relatives. But the rules are murkier — and currently far more restrictive — when it comes to pictures on Facebook, emails to friends or relatives and even financial records stored in online cloud accounts.
Google, Facebook and other companies have said a federal privacy law approved decades before digital storage became common prevents them from releasing electronic memories or records unless the account owner grants permission — even if the person is dead. Without an estate plan, families must try to crack their loved one’s passwords or take the costly step of litigating the matter to access photos and emails — and some have, with little success.
The laws governing how to divide belongings after someone dies have not caught up with the technological advances that have permeated the ways people communicate, but states have begun trying to bridge that gap.
With the new laws, unless a person expresses otherwise, companies will release basic information from a user, such as the person’s email contact list, to help find friends or gather an inventory of a person’s assets. But to get the actual contents of the emails — even the subject lines — or photos and documents stored in a cloud service, people must proactively specify who they want to have their digital belongings.
The Chicago-based Uniform Law Commission wrote the legislation states are passing with the support of internet companies, but that wasn’t always the case. Initially, the commission wanted administrators of a person’s estate to have access to everything from users’ accounts in cases where someone did not leave instructions about what to do with their digital assets.
Only one state, Delaware, managed to pass that version of the commission’s proposal, but 27 legislatures tried and failed in 2014.
Carl Szabo, senior policy counsel at NetChoice, an industry group that represents the interests of such companies as Facebook, Google and PayPal, said the revised legislation “balances the needs of the bereaved with the privacy interests of the account holders and the people with whom they corresponded.”