“Obituary pirates” scrape websites and publish their own versions of death notices, reaping commissions on flowers and gifts.
died in August. A blood clot traveled from her leg into her lungs, and in a flash, she was gone. “It wasSoon after, Thompson and his stepdaughter wrote an obituary. It described how Jane, an avid baker, was known as “The Cheesecake Lady” and how she had two dogs, Tugs and Cash. Less than three days later, a company called Echovita published on its website a summary of what they had written. It said Tug and Cash were Jane’s “close friends,” failing to note that they were dogs.
In July, Service Corporation International, a New York Stock Exchange–traded conglomerate that owns 1,500 funeral homes, sued Echovita. It alleged that the Quebec-based company scraped details from obituaries, including Jane Thompson’s, from SCI’s website and republished them. “Mining people’s personal data—at the lowest point in their lives—is disappointing,” a spokesperson for the funeral conglomerate says in an email.
“I'm mad that their algorithm, or whatever program they use, printed such a piece of crap. And I'm mad that people that we love and respect read it.”Leclerc has come under fire for alleged obituary piracy in the past. In 2019, a judge in Canada ordered Afterlife, where Leclerc was a director, to pay
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