Her dying husband left her the house and the car. He forgot the Apple
password.
By Yanan Wang The Washington Post
After Peggy Bush’s husband, David, succumbed to lung cancer last
August, she liked to play card games on their iPad to pass the time. The
72-year-old resident of Victoria, Canada, was on an app one day when it
suddenly stopped working, and she was unable to reload the device
without providing a password for their Apple ID account.
Bush’s husband never told her the password, and she hadn’t thought
to ask. Unlike so many of the things David had left for Bush in his will
- car ownership, the title of the house, basically everything he owned -
this digital asset followed him to the grave.
According to reporting by the Canadian Broadcasting Channel, the
journey to procure the password proved more difficult than any other
process involved in David’s passing.
"I thought it was ridiculous," Bush told CBC. "I could get the
pensions, I could get benefits, I could get all kinds of things from the
federal government and the other government. But from Apple, I couldn’t
even get a silly password."
At first, they thought the solution would be simple. Bush’s
daughter, Donna, called Apple to ask about having the password retrieved
and the account reset. The company then requested David’s will and death
certificate.
When they got these documents together and called a second time,
Apple said they had never heard of the case. Donna told CBC that it took
several phone calls and two months of waiting for Apple to accept a
notarized death certificate, her father’s will and the serial numbers
for the iPad and Mac computer to which Bush also wanted access.
But this was not enough. Over the phone, a representative told Donna
the next step: "You need a court order."
"I was just completely flummoxed," Donna told CBC. "What do you mean
a court order?"
Obtaining one could cost thousands of dollars, depending on the need
for a lawyer, so Donna decided to take her complaint straight to the top.
"I then wrote a letter to Tim Cook, the head of Apple, saying this
is ridiculous," she said. "All I want to do is download a card game for
my mother on the iPad. I don’t want to have to go to court to do that,
and I finally got a call from customer relations who confirmed, yes,
that is their policy."
While Bush had the option of setting up a new Apple ID account, that
would have meant losing all the app purchases that she and her husband
had made on the original one.
Bush ended up buying a new laptop (not a Mac). Her mission to gain
access to her husband’s Apple ID seemed futile until CBC’s "Go Public"
wing contacted the company on Bush’s behalf.
Apple apologized for the "misunderstanding" and has since started
working with Bush to solve the issue without a court order, CBC reported
this week.
For the Bushes, the overdue response feels like putting a Band-Aid
on a larger problem.
"We certainly don’t want other people to have to go through the
hassle that we’ve gone through," Donna told CBC. "We’d really like Apple
to develop a policy that is far more understanding of what people go
through, especially at this very difficult time in our family’s life,
having just lost my dad."
Toronto estate lawyer Daniel Nelson told CBC that online access is
controlled by service providers such as Apple, even if users own their
digital material. He described the court order demand as "heavy-handed,"
but also said Canadian digital property laws are "murky."
While the incident occurred in Canada, Americans have encountered
similar snafus involving the digital assets of deceased relatives on
this side of the border.
In 2011, after 15-year-old Eric Rash of Virginia committed suicide,
his parents desperately wanted to know why. But when they tried looking
to his Facebook page for answers, the website cited state and federal
privacy laws blocking their access.
"We were just grieving parents reaching out for anything we could,"
Rash’s father, Ricky, told The Washington Post in 2013.
The question of whether digital assets should be treated the same as
material possessions where inheritance is concerned has emerged
naturally with the growing ubiquity of social media usage, but few
concrete answers have been offered by lawmakers and legal authorities.
Most states place digital and physical property in different categories,
and tech companies themselves prohibit password-sharing. This means that
often a person’s virtual trail continues to float in cyberspace
following their death, adding to the grief felt by surviving family.
That, however, is slowly changing.
Thanks to a bill passed two years ago, Virginia is now among a
handful of other states that have enacted legislation addressing the
inheritance of email, blogs and other social media. More recently,
Delaware passed a law in 2014 that gives family members and other heirs
complete control over an individual’s digital accounts after their
passing. And nearly a year ago, Face-book rolled out new settings that
allow users to manage how their account will appear to the public and
whether they want to pass it onto someone else in the event of their deaths.
"It’s big. It’s real big," attorney Deborah Matthews told The Post
in August 2014, after the Delaware legislation was announced. "I ask my
clients the same thing I ask them about their safe deposit boxes: Who
has access? Who has a key?"
--
================================================
Duane Whittingham - N9SSN
(ARES/RACES, EmComm, Skywarn & Red Cross)
http://www.radiodude.info
================================================
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