‘A moral issue’: Canadian funeral directors warn against unauthorized obituaries – News Canada

HALIFAX — Funeral directors across the country are warning grieving families about the trend of posting obituaries on third-party websites for profit.

Jim Bishop, funeral director at Bishop’s Funeral Home in Fredericton, said he has noticed an increase in the number of people using his services complaining about altered obituaries — sometimes with incorrect information — appearing on one such website called Echovita.

Bishop said Echovity’s actions are part of a trend of scraping information from funeral home and newspaper websites and republishing it alongside options to purchase flowers and digital candles. He said the scraping of data poses a “moral problem” because it uses obituaries without the knowledge or consent of families.

“When people go to Google and search for a person’s name … they don’t always realize that they’re not dealing with a funeral home website with that source. They’re getting a link to an outside company that they think is us, and it’s not.”

He added that since mid-July, about a dozen people have informed him that their loved one’s obituary had been deleted.

Jeff Weafer, president of the Funeral Services Association of Canada, said the practice is particularly problematic because writing an obituary is the last chance a family has to tell the story of their loved one’s life. Using that story without permission can feel like an invasion of privacy at a particularly difficult time.

“Part of the expression of grief for families is wanting to proudly tell the story of your father, your brother, your mother. Telling that story is very therapeutic, whether it’s through an obituary or a note on Facebook that shares details of someone’s life,” Weafer said in an interview.

The Better Business Bureau, which has not accredited Echovita, has five complaints about the company on its website. One complaint from 2022 called Echovita a “trolling company” for posting an unapproved and altered version of an obituary, causing great distress to a grieving family.

An anonymous Echovita official responded to the complaint that the company had removed the obituary from its site. “I would like to add that the information we shared was not private as stated, as the original obituary was posted publicly on the internet,” the response said. “In re-sharing the basic facts of what we do, which is legal, we made a human error and apologized.”

A review of Echovita published last month on the Better Business Bureau website also expressed concerns about the site’s practices.

“My grandfather recently died, and when I Googled his obituary, the first result was some random site I’d never heard of, Echovita. The obituary was not what my family posted,” the review reads. The review continues, saying that in addition to being “terribly written,” the reposted obituary lists living family members listed in the original announcement as deceased.

“My family was devastated that this fake obituary was the first hit people would see when they searched for my grandfather’s name. We were so embarrassed that people would think we wrote something so poorly written to ‘honor’ our deceased loved one.” In response to the review, Echovita apologized “for any errors in the obituary.”

Echovita declined to be interviewed by The Canadian Press. In an emailed statement, a public relations agent speaking on behalf of the company said family members who notice errors in obituaries can request corrections directly on the website, but did not provide any details about the company’s verification processes.

The Canadian Press also asked how Echovita verifies that flowers purchased on its website — which range in price from $90 to $334 — reach grieving families or funeral homes where services are held. Echovita did not provide any details.

Weafer said the Funeral Services Association of Canada has been lobbying the federal government to tighten privacy laws to protect families from more suffering, but added the association has yet to see a “significant response” from lawmakers.

The Bereavement Authority of Ontario also posted two separate notices about Echovita’s practices, one in February 2021 and another in February of this year. A spokesperson for the authority said 11 people have complained since the beginning of this year that they were “deeply upset” about their loved ones’ obituaries being used on the website.

The Quebec Business Register lists Echovita as having an address in Quebec City and lists its CEO as Paco Leclerc.

In a 2019 court ruling, Leclerc was named as one of the directors of the now-defunct Afterlife website that was ordered to pay $20 million in damages to grieving families for unauthorized use of obituaries and photos. The ruling found that Afterlife repeatedly violated copyright laws by using the data to market flower sales.

At the time, Erin Best, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said she hoped the decision would act as a “deterrent” to obituary piracy and warned that those who copied obituaries should expect legal action.

While their push for tougher regulations continues, Bishop and Weafer encourage grieving families to ask third-party obituary publishers to remove unauthorized listings or contact their government consumer protection agency, if available.