Death and your digital afterlife

We share so much information online, but what happens to it all when someone dies? Enter the social media will, writes John Hearne

SO much of our lives are lived online these days. Twitter and Facebook are lovingly tended, email accounts are packed with years of correspondence. But what happens to that online life when your real life stops?

The US government has recently begun advising people to make a ‘social media will’. A government blog advises: “If you have social media profiles set up online, you should create a statement of how you would like your online identity to be handled. Just like a traditional will helps your survivors handle your physical belongings, a social media will spells out how you want your online identity to be handled”. The document goes on to urge the appointment of an online executor: “This person will be responsible for closing your email addresses, social media profiles and blogs after you are deceased.”

It might seem like a small issue, but there have already been several cases where disputes over who takes control of what have caused serious problems.

Benjamin Stassen, a 20-year-old Wisconsin student, committed suicide two years ago. Had it happened 20 years ago, his family would have gone to his old letters and diaries to try to discover what lead him to such a tragic and unexpected decision. But this is the Facebook generation; they don’t use paper.

The Stassens’ search lead them into a protracted battle with Facebook. Citing user agreements which promised privacy, the social networking giant would not give up the dead man’s passwords. The grieving family obtained a court order requiring Facebook to hand over the necessary information. Facebook is now considering its next move.

There have been other high-profile cases. When Justin Ellsworth was killed while serving in Iraq, his father tried to create a memorial to his son using the emails he wrote. Yahoo, however refused to release the messages, citing the privacy terms of its user agreement with the dead soldier.

While most of us won’t have to go through such traumas, the question of what happens to our digital lives after we’re gone remains. Nearly half a million Facebook users die every year. What happens to those pages?

Five years ago, it was Facebook’s policy to delete the profiles of people they found out had died. However, following the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007, many of the profiles of the 32 students who were murdered became impromptu memorials. Their families pleaded with Facebook not to take them down. A few years later, the company introduced the ‘memorialisation’ of user accounts.

“When a user passes away,” the site says, “we memorialise their account to protect their privacy. Memorialising an account sets the account privacy so only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. Friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.”

Solicitor and digital rights expert Simon McGarr says the best way of avoiding conflict and uncertainty after you’ve gone is to leave the information with someone; to make, effectively, a digital will.

“Because these companies can be very difficult to deal with, by far the easiest thing to do is to leave passwords as part of the will… That way, people can make the necessary changes from inside their account as opposed to knocking on the door.”

The difficulty is we’re encouraged to change our passwords frequently for security reasons. McGarr advises using a password-generating programme, which turns out convoluted, uncrackable passwords, while you only have to remember the one to get into the programme in the first place. “So no matter how many high-security passwords you need, you’ve got the one master key that opens the lock on them.” Then you leave that password with someone you trust.

But who owns this information? If your user agreement with Facebook or Yahoo or Google empowers them to lock the door and throw away the key after you’re gone, can anybody do anything?

“There’s no difference between your digital assets and any other form of assets as far as the estate is concerned,” says McGarr. Your passwords, accounts, documents, photographs, and any archives floating around in the cloud are as much a part of your estate as your computer, your car and your house, regardless of what the internet giants say. But as the Stassens and Ellsworths have found, proving that may not be easy.

Of course, many of us may not want our online lives to continue when our real lives stop. In which case, Google and Facebook are on your side.