Friday, December 24, 2004

Can's Open, Worms Are Crawling Out
From the AP through cnn.news, "Digital Inheritance Raises Legal Questions." All right, so they only got to the point a few days after we did. And, they raised all the same questions we've raised here. "As more of our personal lives go digital, family members, estate attorneys and online service providers are increasingly grappling with what happens to those information bits when their owners die."

One thing bothers me. This quote: "People might decide what they want family members to see or keep secret sometimes for family harmony reasons," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who served as former President Bill Clinton's chief privacy counselor. "They may know secrets of other family members that they hold in confidence: The sister had an abortion; the father had a first marriage."

Swire said Yahoo's policies are stricter than those for medical records -- and rightly so. He said quick access to medical records is needed for emergency care, and such records are unlikely to trample other people's privacy rights, as e-mail could.

It's the medical records thing... HIV... Drug use... Out of wedlock birth... Abortion... Having your family find out about that doesn't trample a person's privacy rights? We may not have agreed on "a" solution, but it seems the experts are more confused than we are. Maybe they should leave it to the amateurs to solve the problem....?
# Permalink   Posted at 2:22 PM        0 comments       Email this Link

---