So much of our lives are online, but what happens when we die?

Peaches Geldof lived her life on Twitter — so what happens now to her words and pictures? Louise Roseingrave looks at our digital legacies.

SO much of our lives are now played out online, but what happens after we die? We leave a digital legacy. A technological interface to provide comfort to our friends and relatives, in the form our pictures, music, emails and thoughts via Twitter, Apple, Gmail, Microsoft and Facebook.

But unlike the assets of our estate, dealt with by an executor of a will, our online activities have no actual value and therefore do not form part of a traditional will. We interact online having agreed to the terms and conditions of individual applications and websites.

Therefore, any arrangements we choose to make for our digital legacy become a more complicated affair.

Prolific tweeters such as Peaches Geldof leave a substantial amount of information online.

The tragic death of the 25-year-old mum of two sparked a massive outpouring of grief on Twitter.

Twitter, like most social media websites, has a specific policy related to the death of a member.

According to US based author Evan Carroll, co-founder of ‘The Digital Beyond’ — a blog about our digital existence and what happens to it after we die — Twitter’s policy is one of the simplest among social media sites.

The company requires (by fax or post, not email) the username of the deceased user’s Twitter account, a copy of their death certificate, a copy of a government-issued ID to be provided by “a person authorised to act on the behalf of the estate or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased”.

Twitter will then work with the authorised representative of the deceased user’s estate to deactivate the account. But if Peaches’ family want to keep a back-up of her profile for her two young sons to peruse in the future, they must leave the account online.

One of Peaches’ final online actions was to tweet a poignant image of herself as a child in the arms of her late mother Paula Yates, who died of a heroin overdose aged 41 in 2000.

“Previously Twitter’s policy included an offer to provide an archive of public Tweets to the family,” Carroll states on his blog. But that policy was discontinued.

Facebook’s policy is more complicated, and includes an offer to ‘memorialise’ an account following the death of account holder.

In its help section, the website accepts requests to place a page in a memorialised state.

“Once the request is approved by Facebook, the account’s privacy is restricted to friends only and certain sensitive information is removed. The profile and wall remain active for friends to post memories and condolences,” Mr Carroll explains. The site also accepts requests to download the contents of a profile or remove a deceased person’s page altogether.

But how many of us are willing to take steps to address our online assets in life, thus removing the onus from our loved ones after we’ve died? West Cork solicitor Flor McCarthy, specialising in probate, trusts and estates explains how the phenomenon of a ‘digital will’ has no legal standing in Ireland.

“Things that we consider that we own digitally are really on licensed,” McCarthy says. “If you look at the terms on iTunes, for instance, you will see that you are given a non-transferable licence that is personal to you only.

“Depending on the extent of your online profile and its importance to you, it may make sense to make what is being referred to as a digital will,”

A digital will is essentially a letter you leave with instructions for what should happen when you die.

“The digital will has no legal significance or meaning in an Irish legal context but I understand that it comes to mean a document or place where you record all of your profiles and passwords and give directions as to what you would wish to happen when you die. People even give directions as to last messages they would like to have sent via social media,” McCarthy says.

The digital will can cover all of your online activities from social media to playlists and email with the exception of an extensive blog containing valuable work and Bitcoins.

The digital currency should be dealt with in a will as part of a deceased person’s estate.

“If you have Bitcoins, they have value and from that point of view they would be no different from stocks and shares.

” Insofar as they exist and have a value that can be traded, they are something that could be specifically referred to in a will,” McCarthy says.