If a man dies, what about the Internet legacy?

You may have decided, when the house to the big son, Shunzhi years of family heirloom to the second son, (the youngest son does not take care of my son did not give him). But your 5 QQ number, turn over the wall Gmail mailbox, Baidu Cloud hundreds of G resources, leave who?

These online accounts, grieving families are all trying to find out, probably to look for pictures of you in your lifetime, or perhaps to address your heritage. But do you really want your elderly mother to see the lily net account you used to secretly apply, or to have your wife see every e-mail you have?

Members of the standard Legal Committee (Uniform Law Commission, ULC) are committed to the standardization of the state's laws, and in Wednesday they enacted a program that would allow relatives of dead people to browse (but not manipulate) their electronic accounts, unless expressly stated in their wills.

The scheme must be a law that needs to be reviewed by the legislative bodies. If passed, a person's network virtual resources will be the same as his real property distribution.

"Most people are dying to remember this, and they don't know how much they're losing," says Karen Williams from Oregon State. She sued Facebook for the use of her son's account, and his 22-year-old son died in a car accident in 2005.

How to deal with "electronic property" is also very important, people's online language, photos, videos are likely to be the same as property assets. A blog full of Luis Suarez recipes, a god-loaded wow account. Imagine that you've found an interview with a former President Bill Clinton or a Bob Dylan song from your hard drive, and that any one who gets an auction will be invaluable.

But privacy advocates are skeptical about the plan. Ginger McCall, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that in order to protect the privacy of both the account and the people with whom it communicates, the judge's approval is required before these accounts are browsed. "Today's world is a networked world, and no one is going to make a book out of his email to hide under the bed." ”

Some people want to give the password to a trusted family member prior to the end of the world, or put the password in the will. Unfortunately, the will is on the record, so the general company's terms of service will not allow access to non-personal accounts. This means that even lovers cannot access their private accounts in the strictest sense.

Many websites have their own set. For example, a friend can still browse past photos and posts. Google's Gmail, tubing and Picasa Network albums also have their own way: If an account is not logged in for a period of time, the account will be deleted or entrusted to others. Yahoo users were told when they registered that the account would eventually be unusable.

But what the company says is the company, and sometimes the courts don't buy it. When a U.S. soldier died in Iraq in 2005 and his parents sued that their children would want to share their e-mails with their parents, the court ordered Yahoo to hand over the e-mails to their parents. Similarly, the mother, who came from Oregon State, eventually won her son's Facebook account, but said it seemed to have been tampered with.

Again, the standard Law committee. According to the proposal, if it is not specifically stated in the will, the deceased's agent, such as the executor, would be granted access to all electronic documents of the deceased, but not be authorized to change them. This law will be above all company terms of service, but the agent may still have to comply with some copyright laws. A chestnut, the wife can browse the dead husband's email content, but cannot send mail from this account. It involves music imagery and cannot be copied without permission.

Returning to the Oregon mother, she said in a telephone interview this week, "I certainly understand why some people don't want to share these things." (Why do you say it) but for us to lose him so suddenly, everything he left behind is so precious to me. And, if we were still in the envelope age, these letters were certainly part of the inheritance, and we didn't expect that. ”