People may have to start including their Facebook and other social
media accounts in their wills if they want family to have access to
photographs and mementos after they die.A legal symposium at the weekend heard that the days of families inheriting boxes of photos and correspondence will soon end, and instead families will be left in legal limbo after the death of loved ones.
Damien McCallig, a PhD student in the school of law at NUI Galway, said it was almost inevitable that people would have to start specifying who should have their Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts after they die. However, legal uncertainty over digital records will extend far beyond sentimental photos.
“We need only look at the uncertainty created after the death of Savita Halappanavar in Galway, where people were fighting over access to medical records,” said Mr McCallig.
“When these records become digitised, this becomes more and more of an issue. At least with a physical record, people can say ‘they are my property and I own them’. When they are digitised, the arguments become over slightly different things and they are locked behind passwords controlled by a certain agency, including the HSE.”
He told the symposium, Privacy from Birth to Death and Beyond, that there was a vast area not governed by legislation.
“In time, people and families look back when loved ones die and find they no longer have shoeboxes of photos; they no longer have scrapbooks or contact lists. They were all stored digitally on Facebook, Gmail, Google, and various other service providers,” he said.
“And when they go to those service providers and say my husband or father has died and seek access to those, they are being denied by the service providers. They are being told they have to protect the privacy rights of the deceased.”