Do you keep up with technology news?

How about privacy laws?

Well, if you haven’t, I’ll summarise a bit of the clash between technology and privacy laws.

You see, many of us have online personalities — that is, we conduct business and personal transactions through the exchanges of electronic bits in place of face-to-face discussions, handshakes and pen-to-paper contractual agreements.

For instance, if a person had once handwritten (or typed) letters of correspondence, leaving the proverbial/ubiquitous/superfluous/euphemistic/cliched paper trail, a researcher or law enforcement person could request or confiscate the pages for historical purposes.

It’s not like one could go to the post office and request a copy of the information that was sent from one person/entity to another.

Enter the information age! [imagine supersonic jets swooping past and videophones embedded in everyone’s eyes, with some sort of thumping soundtrack]

Now, much of our online equivalent of letters and parcels is stored on computing devices somewhere out there.

Call it the cloud or server farms or data centers or Joe Bob’s Internet Service Shoppe.

Regardless of where, your former/current online life lives on in perpetuity, whether intentionally or accidentally.

For instance, as many of you know, my father is working his way through the stages of ALS bulbar option, with an added task of encephalopathy/dementia, meaning he has little to no clue about accessing his former online life.

Which brings us to the bottom line.

I am not a government.  I am not an academic researcher.  I am not a novelist looking for an interesting person to chronicle and fictionalise (well, maybe I am some of that but not in this moment).

I am my father’s son.

I want to carry on my father’s legacy, including online correspondence as well as making sure any outstanding electronic monetary transactions are concluded successfully.

I simply want to give my mother access to her husband’s (my father’s) email account with Yahoo!.

The employees at Yahoo! Customer Care have been kind enough to tell me that they take my father’s email account seriously and will not just give out his access information to any Jane, Jill or Joe Bob.

The very bottom line?  If you have an online presence and lose your cognitive ability, make sure ahead of time that someone you know/love/trust has your account access information readily available.  Otherwise, it takes a court order to gain access.

That’s a legacy I’m chasing today, through legal channel surfing.

I’ll leave you with Ode to Joy (Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee) to close out this romp through the hoops of the online world.