I guess I’m the only one who just changed their voicemail message.
I just buy a post office box and never give out the address. Cheap, safe, better access. It’s like a secret hiding spot.
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Back to the safe deposit box analogy.
If I die without a will, and my safe deposit box happens to contain a dozen one ounce Kruggerands, my consent for them to pass to my heirs is immaterial.
If I leave no will, they might fall to my (hypothetical) estranged son, even if he were the last person in the world I would want them to go to. They are, by law, his property.
If the bank tries to retain them because I didn’t specifically give consent for their release, they will soon find themselves compelled by the courts to do so.
Again, IANAL, so this is all predicated upon my understanding of how the law treats the property of the deceased.
Right, and there are comparable rules in the UK-- which is great as far as it goes-- but there’s no basic social convention underlying those rules and if you try to get at your medical records or credit report, it’s handled very grudgingly (particularly in the latter case, where they do everything possible to hide the fact they’re required to give you the information for free). It’s like if a house guest tried to walk out with your TV; yes, you have the law to prevent it, but really you need people to just not do that in the first place.
My point in this case was just that if there were a better-developed convention of information propriety, that T-Mobile agent would not have thought it was an appropriate suggestion, any more than your dead father’s landlord offering to sell you his clothes as a memento. In some cases the landlady might actually have the right to do that, but she’d know it to be an asshole move, and not a kind suggestion.
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The outgoing voice mail message is essentially the only public information the telco has. And since it’s public, it’s possible for anyone to capture this data themselves without the telco doing anything. But by actively doing something to transfer any data to third parties in a way not consented to by the deceased, the telcos potentially open themselves up to liability, especially since it would almost certainly violate their privacy policies (and make a change to these policies and you would likely get an earful from privacy advocates like Cory).
Different jurisdictions have different default inheritance laws, and in the US this is done on a state-by-state basis. Without getting into the specifics, suffice it to say that the variance in inheritance law reflects different policy choices and different beliefs in what the rules should be in the absence of specific instructions. Treating previously private information as property, and therefore subject to some sort of default inheritance rules, will require another round of policy choices, and I’m not sure that there’s a clear argument for treating secret information the same as stocks and bonds.
Yes, but the proprietor of this information is not the survivor, but the deceased. Should there be some rule that third parties have to divest themselves of information deposited with them when the owner of that information dies? Would it be nice if people attending wakes divested themselves of all the secret or private information the deceased entrusted with them?
I agree with you here.
But if we don’t make that round of policy choices, the fate of that previously private information will remain as it is today, subject to the sole discretion of the physical custodian of the data, without regard for the wishes of any person, living or dead.
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I don’t work for a phone company, but I’m a geek, and I’ve had people ask me to help them get the VMs off of a dead love one’s phone. It could be something that the the CS rep has encountered before and was just trying to help out.
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As I said earlier, there are easy workarounds: include the PIN/password in your will. This has the added advantage of disclosing this confidential information only when the deceased expressly authorized it.
Yes, absolutely. It’s a good idea, and not even a workaround, but a deliberate, thoughtful solution.
Still, various studies place the number of people who die without a will at around 55%, so what do we do about them?
Been (sorta) there, done that. When my mother died, T-Mobile wanted an official copy of her death certificate [1] in order to cancel the contract. It should be noted that her line had never had a phone purchase on it; the only line with months left was my own – which I wasn’t canceling.
For thirty bucks (the duration until my contract ended) it wasn’t worth the bother, but it was decidedly a dick move.
[1] I’m still waiting for that official copy, and it’s been almost two years.
I used to work for a cableco in the UK, and they required a fax (yes, a fax, FFS. God, I hate faxes) of the death certificate to close the account and stop billing (which, IIRC, stopped upon receipt and subsequent processing of said super-future missive. Fucking faxes. To one of the biggest ISPs in the country. Dicks).
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This is about the closest thing I could find on how to get AMR files off your phone.
http://forums.androidcentral.com/nexus-4-rooting-roms-hacks/341859-visual-voicemail-data-can-i-transfer-another-phone.html
My condolences.
Thank you. I’ll see if I can figure it out. Like that guy is saying, locating where the VMs are even stored on the phone seems impossible and the T-Mobile guys give me a different answer every time. I’ve tried forwarding them to myself but they don’t come through.
Well, this is a real issue. I have a older friend, a lady, who recently had a close friend die. The man was involved in several extramarital relationships that seemed to run the gamut from flirtatious/occasional indiscretion to keeping an apartment with another woman. The family somehow unlocked his email and discovered all of these relationships at the exact moment they were involved in processing the burial details. It was very hard for the family to be coping with his deception right then.
Now, obviously, the best thing would have been for this guy to a) not be a douche or b) delete some of his fucking emails/have a private account his family knew nothing about. However, perhaps also it would have just been best for the family to not be able to access the account.
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