The final breach of Terms and Conditions
Paypal recently wrote to a woman who had died of cancer, saying her death had breached the terms and conditions, and warned that it might take legal action as a result.
Lisa Durdle died at the end of May, a result of breast cancer, at the tragically young age of 37. Her bereaved husband notified Paypal and provided copies of her death certificate and her will, as requested by Paypal. Paypal then sent a letter (a paper letter, not an email) addressed to her, which points out that the account has an outstanding balance of £3,240.72 owed to Paypal. The letter states "You are in breach of condition 15.4c of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased", and goes on to say "this breach is not capable of remedy".
Paypal has apologized for this shockingly bad way of handling the situation and taken the predictable reaction of a money-rich large corporation, of writing off the debt to try to get some good PR out of this, but this cannot be the first time a Paypal user has passed away owing the company money and whoever devised the Paypal systems should surely have been able to anticipate this. However, some internet companies have already anticipated what they will do when you shuffle off this mortal coil, and you might not be too impressed with their ideas.
Do you have a record collection that goes back years, a mixture of CDs and vinyl (which is now coming back into fashion). Clearly, that is something your heirs will inherit. But what if you have spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds over the years on iTunes instead of physical media? Apple says its user ids are non transferable, and under section D of its tortuous terms and conditions it states "your Account is non-transferable and that any rights to your Apple ID or Content within your Account terminate upon your death".
Facebook, if it learns of your demise, will turn your account into a memorialized account, supposedly with the best of intentions to allow your friends to remember you and post "we miss you" messages to the page. So even when you are dead, Facebook plans to continue profiling you and your relationships and make money out of you. If you want to avoid that, you need to appoint a Legacy Contact who will be able to manage or delete your account when you pass away, and until then, that just happens to be another bit of valuable relationship info which Facebook will add to its creepy dossier of every detail of your life.
Just about anything where you have a username and password is potentially a problem. Have you put your lifetime's worth of photos into cloud storage? Is your online email a treasure trove of correspondence? Have you got money squirrelled away in Bitcoin? Just about all these services say it is both a security risk and a breach of their terms and conditions to share your non-transferable ID with anyone, but if you want to pass on your intellectual property to someone else, it is probably a good idea to make sure your nearest and dearest have a copy of your logins and passwords.
7th August 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.