The story of a family's fight to see its late son's email is generating a lot of debate this week. U.S. Marine Justin Ellsworth was killed in Iraq last month, and webmail provider Yahoo! is refusing to grant his family access to his account. Yahoo! based its decision on company policy that email accounts and all contents associated with them terminate upon a user's death and that accounts are deleted after 90 days of inactivity. The story took a turn for the absurd today with USA Today reporting that Ellsworth's family has received offers from two hackers to help them break into their son's account. To their credit, the family has expressed no interest in such a course of action, opting instead to seek a resolution with Yahoo!

Those supporting the soldier's family state the importance of protecting history. Comparing the email account to letters written by WWII soldiers, they say the deletion of the email by Yahoo! would amount to the loss of important documents of family history.

As the son of an avid genealogist (and former Marine), I certainly understand a family's desire to obtain any record of their son's life so that it can be preserved and passed down to future generations. As a fallen American soldier, Justin Ellsworth deserves that kind of honor (and then some). But if his family wants a record of his wartime correspondence, they should obtain copies from the recipients of that correspondence.

Access to Ellsworth's email account would give his family access to a lot more than just his war emails. In fact, any emails authored by the soldier himself would only be included in the account if he opted to save his sent messages, an option that is turned off by default in Yahoo! Mail. What family members would be more likely to find are emails sent by others to their son. What about those people's right to privacy? Yahoo! is in no position to weigh the merits of every request it receives to open a deceased user's account. In a time when civil liberties seem to be disposable, a company that truly protects its customers' privacy should be applauded.

Ellsworth's father says that what he really wants access to are the final messages that the soldier didn't get a chance to send before his death. The family is hoping to print out copies of these drafts for inclusion in a scrapbook. Unfortunately, because Ellsworth had not yet sent these messages to anyone, it is arguable that he had not yet waived any expectation of privacy associated with the messages. Furthermore, it's simply not possible to grant access to these messages without compromising the privacy of messages that the family has no entitlement to see. (Unless Yahoo! staffers read all of the account's contents themselves to determine what to release and what to protect; but such a course of action in itself would be an invasion of privacy.)

There's a reason we password protect our accounts: because the contents are private. I love my family very much, but that doesn't necessarily mean I want them sifting through my inbox after I'm gone. In reality, I'd have no problem with them accessing my email accounts, but my ISP shouldn't make that assumption for me. Or anyone else.

What about corporate email accounts? Many people use their email at work for personal correspondence (regardless of their employer's email policies). Should companies be expected to grant network access to a deceased employee's family? I doubt such an expectation would ever garner widespread support. Why, then, should a corporation's right to protect its secrets be any more important than an individual's right to do the same thing?

[CNN.com] Dead Marine's kin plead for e-mail
[USATODAY.com] Marine's family gets e-mail dispute help
[Slashdot.org] Dead? Hope You Left Someone Your Passwords
[iafrica.com] Yahoo blocks dead soldier's emails