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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @01:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @01:53PM (#959511)

    Currently having a similar problem, daily email from an ex-colleague who died well over two years ago..(he was a pilot, his standard password was Topgun related, appears on the usual lists and he'd been warned on a number of occasions about it, but, people being people...).

    They started arriving less than 6 months ago, and the free webmail provider hosting the account is less than bloody interested in dealing with it, no matter how distressing it is for his widow to receive daily spam apparently from her dead husband.

    Thankfully, he only used the account for things like mostly sending out really bad jokes and never for anything serious, though his business email account had exactly the same password it *was* disabled/deleted shortly after he died, unfortunately this one was forgotten about until it was too late..

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @09:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @09:33PM (#960019)

    If you know the password and account, why not login and change it? Lock the spammers out at least...