[Chapter-delegates] Digital Life Documentary on BBC

[Glenn McKnight]

BBC  Audio Documentary on Digital Life

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rl5r4


ABSTRACT

Who do you want to be able to read your old emails when you die? Are the
dead entitled to privacy? Jolyon Jenkins reports on the increasingly
contentious issue of our digital legacy.

As we lead more of our lives online, we leave behind an ever bigger digital
footprint when we go. There are the public parts - the blogs, the tweets,
the forum posts - but also the private things such as the emails stored on
servers owned by companies like Google. Sorting out the digital legacy is
becoming as onerous as being a traditional executor.

But it brings entirely new problems: in the case of people who have died
suddenly or mysteriously, relatives sometimes feel that they are entitled
to get access to the email accounts of dead person to try to find a clue to
what was happening in their lives. But many email providers resist handing
over this material because of a confidentiality clause in their terms and
conditions. Jolyon Jenkins talks to the Stassen family in Wisconsin who
took both Facebook and Google to court to gain access to the accounts of
their son Benjamin who committed suicide. He also talks to Esther in Kenya
who similarly would like to get into her dead sister's email account to try
to find a clue to her unexplained death. But unlike the Stassens, Esther
has had no luck.

These are uncharted waters, where analogies with old technology quickly
break down, where the principles are unclear, and where important private
and personal matters seem to be left to the discretion of big corporations.

Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.
Glenn McKnight
mcknight.glenn at gmail.com
skype  gmcknight
twitter gmcknight
.
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