Hacked Obituaries | Funeral Homes Warn Public

(Halifax) Funeral directors across the country are warning grieving families about websites that republish obituaries for profit.

Read again “Obituaries: Millions behind families’ backs”

Jim Bishop, the director of a funeral home in Fredericton, N.B., says he’s noticed a growing number of customers complaining about altered obituaries that are sometimes full of errors posted on sites like Echovita.

Bishop criticizes the companies for taking information from funeral home or newspaper websites and republishing it on their own, adding the option to buy digital flowers or candles. He says the data collection poses “a moral problem” because it profits from obituaries without the families’ permission.

Since mid-July, around ten people have warned him that the death notices of a loved one had been retrieved.

According to the Quebec Enterprise Registrar, Echovita is established in Quebec.

Jeff Weafer, president of the Funeral Services Association of Canada, said the practice is problematic because writing an obituary is often a family’s last chance to tell the story of a loved one. For a site to scrape an obituary without permission can be seen as a breach of privacy during a difficult time.

“For families, grief is expressed in part through the story of their father, their brother, their mother that they want to tell proudly. It’s very therapeutic, whether we do it through an obituary or a message on Facebook,” he says.

The Better Business Bureau, a non-governmental agency based in several cities across North America, has not accredited Echovita. According to the BEC website, five complaints have been filed against the company. One of them in 2022 accused Echovita of being “a phishing company” for publishing modified, but unauthorized, versions of an obituary, causing great distress to the grieving family.

At the time, an unidentified Echovita official responded that the obituary had been removed from its site and apologized for the mistake while defending the company’s right to disseminate information already published on the Internet.

Other similar errors have been reported, according to the Better Business Bureau website.

Two complaints were also filed with the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, a corporation contracted by the Ontario provincial government to administer the funeral, burial and cremation services provisions of the Act, one in February 2021 and the other in February of this year.

Echovita spokespeople declined to be interviewed by The Canadian Press. In an emailed statement, a public relations officer said that if a bereaved person notices an error in an obituary, they can request a correction directly on the website. He did not, however, elaborate on the company’s verification methods.

Echovita claims that the republication of obituaries is justified because it involves sharing information that has already been disseminated in the public space.

In 2019, Echovita’s current president, Paco Leclerc, was one of the managers of a now-defunct website, Afterlife, which was ordered by the Federal Court to pay $20 million in damages for the unauthorized use of obituaries and photos.

According to the judgment, “the evidence establishes that Afterlife associated the original works with a product or service, even if the connection between the two was not very significant, by adding the sale of advertisements, flowers and candles to the pages displaying the obituaries.”

Afterlife subsequently declared bankruptcy.

Bishop and Weafer recommend that grieving families ask any third-party company to remove unauthorized obituaries from their site or contact the provincial consumer protection office. Both say they want to see tougher rules against sites that pirate obituaries. The Funeral Services Association of Canada says it is still waiting for “a meaningful response” from federal parliamentarians.