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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 17 2020, @01:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the Backups-vs-Bitrot-vs-Businesses-vs-Beliefs dept.

What happens to our online lives after we die?

Over the course of the next few decades, there will be more and more dead people on Facebook. In fact, according to some estimates, as early as 2060 the number of deceased users' accounts will exceed the number of accounts with a living person behind them.

But people's "digital afterlives" extend far beyond Facebook. When a 21st century citizen dies, they often leave behind a trove of posts, private messages, and personal information on everything from Twitter to online bank records. Who owns this data, and whose responsibility is it to protect the privacy of the deceased? Faheem Hussain, a social scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, has spent the past few years peering into the murky waters of how people, platforms, and governments manage the digital lives we leave behind.

Hussain gave a presentation on our digital legacies today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes Science. We caught up with Hussain to talk about why online platforms should encourage people to plan ahead for their imminent deaths, whether you have a right to privacy after you die, and the strange new culture of digital mourning.

The article proceeds to investigate answers to these questions:

[...]Q: What does a typical 21st century digital legacy look like?
[...]Q: Why should people take this seriously?
[...]Q: Do deceased people still have a right to privacy?
[...]Q: Google has an opt-in setting that allows you to have your data deleted once you pass away. What do you suggest people do to set their digital accounts in order before they die?
[...]Q: How should we interact with the dead on social media?

[Ed. note: We here at SoylentNews have already experienced this with the passing of MichaelDavidCrawford who, with great foresight specified his wishes for his writings and publications. As a tribute to his active participation here, a collection of approximately twenty community-submitted statements of his have been immortalized as 'fortunes' on this site.--martyb]


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @02:28PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @02:28PM (#959166)

    "Over the course of the next few decades, there will be more and more dead people on Facebook. In fact, according to some estimates, as early as 2060 the number of deceased users' accounts will exceed the number of accounts with a living person behind them."

    Good, Growth! ... and Profit!!!1!

    No, seriously, come 2060 one can only hope that Facebook is only a far distant memory of the past, like Geocities, Myspace, and Webrings.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Monday February 17 2020, @03:23PM (2 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday February 17 2020, @03:23PM (#959175) Journal
    The number of fake accounts probably already exceeds the living. You've been able to buy Facebook followers in bulk since pretty much the beginning. A decade ago you could buy a million for $25k, and celebrities did that on both Twitter and Facebook to get an early boost to create buzz. Facebook doesn't care about the bot accounts - anything that makes them look more relevant means more money from advertisers as real people follow the bots.

    What happens to my data when I die? I don't care, and I doubt anyone else will. And that's the way it should be. When I'm dead I want to STAY dead. Unless I can come back with rabies and a pen and paper - so I can make a list of people to bite.

    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @10:18PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @10:18PM (#959325)

      Can we bring you back and make a commercial of you dancing with vacuum cleaners?

      How about we brought you back as a "hologram"?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @10:27PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @10:27PM (#959331)

        How about we brought you back as a "hologram"?

        You're such a smeghead, Rimmer!

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @03:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @03:54PM (#959187)

    > No, seriously, come 2060 one can only hope that Facebook is only a far distant memory of the past, like Geocities, Myspace, and Webrings.

    Haven't been to https://neocities.org/ [neocities.org] yet I take it?

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 17 2020, @10:40PM (3 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday February 17 2020, @10:40PM (#959337) Journal

    I would certainly like to hear of alternatives to Facebook. Not sure I like Diaspora, in that I fear it may not be reliable.

    What I'd really prefer is guaranteed, free DNS names for all, and ISPs required to leave critical ports unblocked. It'd be just like street addresses. Who names streets and roads? The people do, through our various governments. The same should be done for the Internet.

    Some years ago, Time Warner quietly started blocking ports 80 and 443, which made it a lot more difficult to host my own web site. But, with the MAFIAA still crusading against piracy, I suppose I'm safer without my website making it obvious that I am assigned to the dynamic IP address I happen to have at that moment. So I haven't made a big fuss about that little change of policy.

    Of course, would need user friendlier web site management.

    There is the further problem that standards can fall out of use. Yes, DNS could certainly be replaced. I have always felt the innate hierarchical nature was a fundamental mistake which imposes organization that is often inaccurate, irrelevant, and/or unnecessary. And, as we have seen from recent activity, makes it vulnerable to hostile takeovers. Why the whole scheme of Top Level Domain Names? Because name resolution without that would be too slow? Maybe, in the 1980s. But search engines have demonstrated incredible speed and reasonable accuracy in handling a far more difficult and chaotic kind of search. Anyway, maybe soylentnews.org should have been soylent.news. Or just SoylentNews.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @10:41AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @10:41AM (#959481)

      Some years ago, Time Warner quietly started blocking ports 80 and 443, which made it a lot more difficult to host my own web site.

      Huh? I have Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter/whatever they're calling themselves these days and they don't block tcp/80 or tcp/443 [spectrum.net].

      I'm currently running a Nextcloud [nextcloud.com] instance through my Spectrum Internet without issue. I do run my own DNS on the domains I own, so I do a little scripting magic to update the zone should the DHCP address change.

      The single DHCP address is why I kept my original ISP as they also don't block ports and also gave me six *free* static IPv4 addresses.

      Perhaps TWC blocked those ports once upon a time, but for the 16 months or so I've had their service, I haven't seen it.

      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 18 2020, @03:29PM (1 child)

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday February 18 2020, @03:29PM (#959541) Journal

        That's what they told me, yes, but somehow, those ports do not work. I can use port 22 just fine, but not 80 or 443. I see no problem on the router; it says it forwards those ports to my web server, just as I configured it. Mind you, commodity home routers are not to be trusted, and I have run into one that said it was forwarding a port when it was in fact not, until I power cycled it. But I've had this problem with TWC/Spectrum for several years now, at 2 different residences with several different brands of modem/routers. Maybe they don't intentionally block it, but have misconfigured something at their end, at their local level so that only a few cities are affected?

        Anyway, I have not spent any more time trying to figure out what the problem is. As I said, I'm not so keen to host a site on the same connection that pirated movies might be downloaded.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @04:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @04:18PM (#959565)

          I can see that.

          Spectrum isn't exactly customer-friendly, and they don't really seem to care if you're satisfied.

          In fact, when I decided to get a second ISP (my other ISP is DSL and quite slow -- and since my Mets are mostly only on cable TV, I haven't cut the cord -- and Internet+TV is actually *less* than what I was paying for my legacy cable TV alone), my first thought was to get rid of TWC/Spectrum and go with another provider.

          Unfortunately, there's long-term construction on the school next door and a scaffold blocks access to the concentrator box outside my apartment building. As such, the other provider in the building was unable to switch me to their concentrator or pull new cable. As such, I went with TWC, which was already in my house.

          However, as I knew from my long acquaintance with them, their service sucks large, hairy donkey balls. In anticipation of installation by the other provider (RCN [rcn.com]), I purchased a cable modem rather than renting from them (I already had a router/firewall -- and not that commodity crap either -- and needed something that would support both ISPs at once), but when they couldn't switch me over, I used it for the TWC connection.

          TWC will not recognize my modem as being on "their" network, despite the fact that they have the MAC address *and* it gets its DHCP address from them. As such, some of the features (specifically the Spectrum TV App) aren't fully functional unless one has *their* cable modem.

          I realize this is rather long-winded, but those jerks really piss me off. Once the scaffolding is gone (2 more years?) they are too.

          In any case, I can confirm that at least where I am, ports 80/443 are *not* blocked, but it doesn't surprise me that they do so elsewhere. I recommend getting rid of them if you can. I know I will as soon as I'm able.