The privacy statement was a list of brands. Not an explanation of how personal information would be handled, or a clear account of what data the company was collecting and why, but a catalogue of corporate entities—the subsidiary businesses, affiliated brands, and employment-adjacent entities that constitute the global corporation’s operational footprint.
I am a person who reads terms and conditions as a matter of habit, and I found it confusing. The confusion was not the product of my inattention. It was the product of a document that was not written for the person reading it.
The person reading it was a family member trying to obtain a livestream link to a funeral. The document was written for the totality of human relationships that the corporation has ever had or anticipates having with anyone who might encounter its systems: customers, suppliers, employees, marketing leads, event participants, data subjects, and legal liabilities. All of these are addressed simultaneously in a compliance architecture that covers every possible relationship the corporation might need to defend in a future dispute, without regard for the relationship that is actually occurring between this document and this person at this moment.
The bereaved family member does not need supplier governance language. They need to know whether their information is safe, whether the ceremony they are attempting to attend is accessible, and whether the access requires them to give up something they would not otherwise agree to give up. The document answered none of these questions directly and implied several things they had not been asked about and would not have chosen.
The photograph clause is the one that most clearly expresses what has happened when the corporation’s compliance architecture is applied to the context of a funeral. The clause, rendered in its practical terms, stated that if an attendee did not want their photograph used in the corporation’s marketing materials, they should not attend the funeral.
Funerals are not concerts. Attendance at a concert is a consumer choice, made in advance, with full knowledge of the event’s nature and the terms under which the venue admits its audience. The person who objects to being photographed at a concert has the option of not attending without a significant cost to any relationship or obligation. The person who objects to being photographed at a funeral may not have this option. The funeral is a ritual of farewell, of duty, of grief. The person who attends is attending because the person who died mattered to them, or because the community expects their presence, or because the cultural and religious traditions within which they live require attendance. The attendance is not discretionary in the way that concert attendance is discretionary.
The clause that treats attendance as discretionary acceptance of promotional image capture has misclassified the relationship between the attendee and the event. It has treated a social and ritual obligation as a consumer choice, and has attached to that consumer choice the standard terms that apply to consumer choices, including the right of the corporation to use images captured at the event for promotional purposes. The misclassification is the product of applying a consumer-events compliance template to an event that is not a consumer event in any meaningful sense. The template does not know the difference. The template was not written to know the difference.
The photographs and memorial materials submitted to the corporation’s systems become, under the terms described, assets available for the corporation’s marketing use. The memorial material that a family has contributed to the commemoration of a specific person—photographs, perhaps, or biographical content used in the service itself—is absorbed into the corporation’s asset governance framework and becomes available for purposes that the family did not intend when they submitted it and may not have consented to in any genuine sense.
The photographs of the dead have a particular character that the asset governance framework does not register. They are not stock images. They are not promotional materials. They are the visual record of a person’s life, selected by the people who loved the person to represent something true about who the person was. The corporation’s use of them in marketing materials—should that occur—would convert the record of a specific individual life into content for the promotion of the corporation’s services. The person in the photograph would become, incidentally, an endorsement of the funeral home that managed their death. The family who provided the photograph would have contributed, without fully understanding the contribution, to the corporation’s advertising.
The clause that permits this is not unusual in corporate terms and conditions. It is unusual in the context of a funeral, because the context of a funeral is the context in which the people whose material is being absorbed are least likely to have the emotional and cognitive resources to assess the implications of what they are agreeing to. The confusion of the document compounds this. The person who cannot determine, from the document’s structure, which terms apply to them and which apply to other categories of people the corporation encounters, cannot make a considered judgment about what they are agreeing to. The confusion is the consent’s precondition.
The email sentence deserves the close attention that its accidental comedy invites. The sentence, as written, encouraged recipients to email the corporation, noted that the corporation did not want them to email it, and specified that they should not email it. The sentence contained its own contradiction. The contradiction was the product of assembling two separately defensible legal positions—the accessibility statement that invites contact, and the liability limitation that restricts the content of contact—into a single sentence that the syntactical structure cannot hold without collapsing into absurdity.
The corporation wants to be accessible in the sense that accessibility signals service orientation. The corporation does not want to be liable for the content of what it receives through its accessible channels, because liability exposure is a risk the compliance architecture is designed to minimise. The two positions are in tension. The sentence attempts to maintain both positions simultaneously and produces the appearance of inviting contact while prohibiting the substance of it.
This is systems language under strain. The organisation is trying to communicate in two registers at once: the warm register of customer service, which invites engagement, and the legal register of liability management, which restricts it. The two registers do not compose into coherent communication. They produce a sentence that says, in effect, please reach out to us, but not with anything meaningful.
The instruction that no confidential information should be sent by email is followed by the observation that all the information the person has already provided—their identity, their family relationship, their attendance at a private ceremony, the photographs and personal content they have contributed—is, from the person’s perspective, confidential. The corporation’s definition of confidential is the legal category: trade secrets, proprietary information, the class of material that professional confidentiality obligations protect in commercial contexts. The person’s definition of confidential is the ordinary one: personal, private, not intended for general circulation. The document does not acknowledge that these definitions differ or that the person’s understanding of confidentiality might apply to the information the corporation has already collected from them.
The most revealing quality of the document, taken as a whole, is that it was written without its reader in mind. This is not unusual for corporate terms and conditions, most of which are assembled by legal teams whose primary obligation is to the corporation’s liability position rather than to the comprehension of the person who will encounter the document. The funeral corporation’s terms and conditions are the accumulated sediment of that legal process, applied to a context that requires human sensitivity and producing a document whose primary effect is to demonstrate the gulf between the corporation’s operational logic and the situation of the person it is addressing.
The situation is grief. The document is compliance architecture. The compliance architecture was not designed for grief and does not adjust for it. It processes the grieving person through the same framework it applies to every other relationship the corporation has, because the framework is the framework and the person is a category within it.
The category is bereaved family member, but the document cannot see this category. It sees the data subject, the event attendee, the marketing lead, the potential customer for pre-paid funeral services, the supplier of memorial content that will become a corporate asset. These are the categories the compliance architecture is built around. They are not wrong descriptions of the relationships the corporation has created. They are descriptions that have replaced the actual relationship with a different set of relationships that are more useful to the corporation’s legal and commercial infrastructure.
You went seeking witness to a death.
The document was seeking something else.
The document did not know this about itself.
The document does not know anything about itself.
It knows what it was written to establish.
It was not written for you.
The Vorpel Foundation