Email giant Yahoo cannot hide behind a decades-old federal law in trying to prevent family members from accessing the accounts of their dead relatives, the state’s highest court ruled.
The case involves John Ajemian, who died in a bike accident in 2006 at the age of 43. He had no will, and his siblings have been entangled in nearly a decade of litigation to try to obtain the contents of Ajemian’s email account, which Yahoo said it does not have to turn over due to the 1986 Stored Communications Act.
The Supreme Judicial Court disagreed.
“We conclude that the SCA does not prohibit such disclosure,” wrote associate justice Barbara Lenk. “Rather, it permits Yahoo to divulge the contents of the email account where, as here, the personal representatives lawfully consent to disclosure on the decedent’s behalf.”
The ruling does not require Yahoo to fork over the contents of the email, only that the act is not a legal barrier, as a lower court judge had previously ruled.
The SJC said whether the rules of service trump the property claim of Ajemian’s representatives is a matter to be decided by a probate court, but the language in the contract could give Yahoo the right to simply delete the account rather than hand it over to next-of-kin.
“The express language of the termination provision, if enforceable, thus purports to grant Yahoo the apparently unfettered right to deny access to the contents of the account,” the decision states, “and, if it so chooses, to destroy them rather than provide them.”
Appearing before the SJC in March, an attorney for Yahoo argued having to turn the emails over would compromise users’ privacy, open the company up to civil suits, and force Yahoo to “administer the estates of 225 million monthly users who are all going to die.”
