Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2016

Journal Title

North Carolina Law Review

Volume

94

Issue

3

Abstract

Americans store an overwhelming amount of sensitive, personal information online. In email accounts, social networking posts, blogs, shared pictures, and private documents, individuals store (perhaps unwittingly) the secrets and details of their lives in an unprecedented manner. During an individual’s life, these accounts are seemingly under the direct control of an account holder. Privacy is occasionally threatened, but people continue to use online services and pour personal information into their online accounts.

When developers created these online services and platforms, it is unlikely that they gave much thought to what would happen to accounts when an account holder died. Yet, the treatment of these accounts after an account holder’s death is an increasingly pressing issue in today’s society as more and more Americans die with active, password-protected accounts in their name. In determining how these assets will be handled at an individual’s death, powerful principles collide—including privacy, contract, property, and freedom of information.

This Article discusses how privacy interests are traditionally terminated at death and explores how they should be revived and reshaped in a digital future. It argues that to align posthumous privacy interests with the needs of a digital future, the law must ensure that succession principles apply to privacy as well as property rights, and that decedents’ individual intent for the fate of digital assets is honored. The Article acknowledges that private contracts may be a sufficient tool to protect privacy after death in some instances, but argues that the lodestar in any discussion of posthumous privacy should be testamentary intent. In the absence of testamentary intent, state legislatures should enact default rules of digital asset succession that accord with the family-centered paradigm of inheritance.

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