Digital Death

It is distressing to be asked to endorse on LinkedIn the skills of a colleague who has died or to be prompted to recommend a post on Facebook to a friend who has passed away. So how does your social platform, gaming network or other holder of your digital profile, deal with death?

The issue over what happens to your data and profile online after death is a difficult one for any online provider but one that is becoming increasingly important as we begin to transact so much of our life online.

A network with millions of users will face the probability of a certain but tiny percentage of its users passing away on any given day. This is not the easiest thing to calculate given there are so many variable determinants such as age, lifestyle and location but the chance of any individual dying on any day is probably somewhere in the region of between 1 in 30,000 to 1 in 250,000.  So a community with 1 million members will probably find that between 4 and 30 of them will die on any day. This is not an insignificant number. When you consider that Facebook boasts more than 1 billion members it is likely that more than 4,000 of their members die every day. In the USA alone more than 580,000 Facebook users will die in this year this according to an article in the Pepperdine University of Law Review by Kristina Sherry. In the same article, Sherry ponders the legal issues that death poses for online profiles. Facebook has introduced a memorialising feature allowing friends and families to have the dead person's account frozen. However this raises issues for how long such a memorial should stay online and whether it is actually what the deceased would have actually wanted.

While Facebook has memorialisation, Google has recently introduced the interactive account manager which allows you to choose to have your data deleted after 3, 6, 9 or 12 months of inactivity. It also allows data access to trusted friends and contacts depending on how you configure your settings. Google says it hopes the new feature will "enable you to plan your digital afterlife in a way that protects your privacy and security and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone".

I sense that the bigger operators such as Google, Facebook or LinkedIn will implement more robust processes to deal with data after death.  However it remains an issue for many of the smaller platforms and communities who do not have the resources to provide a smooth and dignified solution that can be initiated for users while alive and does not cause distress to family and friends later.

A potential solution that goes encompasses issues beyond dealing with death is that of maintaining a generic digital identity online and providing instructions for processing online profiles on death.

This is not an easy topic but one that affects every one of us alive today and reading this.