Saskatoon man raises ethical concerns after sister’s obituary altered online

A Saskatoon man says he was shocked to find his sister’s obituary rewritten and reposted on a third-party website without his consent. Stacey Hein reports.

A Saskatoon man says he was shocked to find his sister’s obituary rewritten and reposted on a third-party website without his consent.

Matthew Marinelli’s sister, CJ Leapard, died in December. Her obituary honoured her life as a hard worker and devoted mother. Marinelli says a different version of her obituary later appeared on a website he did not recognize, containing altered wording and false information.

“It was quite appalling,” he said. “To realize that this fake obituary stating that she was survived by her husband, but yet her husband had died like ten years before that.”

Leapard’s obituary was posted on a website called Echovita, a Quebec-based company.

Marinelli reached out to Echovita, asking it to remove the post, which it has since done.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Echovita told CTV News: “We are a Canadian organization that centralizes, aggregates, and amplifies publicly available obituaries to inform the general public of a passing. Our mission is to make public information more easily accessible, free of charge.”

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The site allows users to purchase memorial items, including trees, virtual candles and flowers in the name of a loved one. The company says families can claim part of the proceeds from virtual candles, while it keeps “a portion, which goes toward our operational costs.”

Katrina German, the founder and CEO of Ethical Digital, says the website’s terms of service place responsibility on users.

“They’re kind of using an opting out scenario rather than allowing people to opt in and say, ‘I want to share this information on your site’,” she said.

Lawyer Peter Jacobsen says the practice may be legal, but it raises ethical concerns.

“The difficulty with it is that they’re doing it without the family’s consent, which is not legally required, but there is sort of an ethical issue here that, I think bothers a lot of people,” he said.

There have been cases where obituary websites have faced legal challenges.

In 2019, a company called Afterlife was ordered to pay $20 million in a class-action lawsuit for breaching copyright laws.

Jacobsen says some sites avoid legal challenges by changing the wording.

“They’re getting around copyright laws by not publishing exactly the same wording as is in the obituary,” he said.

Morgan Edwards, president and CEO of Saskatoon Funeral Home, says his company has received complaints from families about obituaries appearing on third-party websites.

“We do from time to time get a call from a family quite upset that the details are wrong, that there’s false information, misleading information, maybe even the service information is incorrect,” Edwards said.

He says third-party obituary posting has long been an issue and believes it has become more common as technology advances.

“I think it’s getting more prevalent with the expansion of artificial intelligence and those third-party websites being able to just aggregate and scrape information on a much larger scale,” he said.

For Marinelli, sharing his experience is about raising awareness and helping other families avoid a similar situation.

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