Death in the Digital Age

“What happens when we die?” This is a question that has occupied countless philosophers, theologians, scientists, stoned first year university students, and even children for centuries. It is one of the fundamental puzzles, alongside “are we alone in the universe?”, and “did I leave the stove on?”

It’s arguable that we may never know the answer to that question, but there are many other questions surrounding death that we can poke at, including “what happens to my things after I die?”, and “how will people remember me after I die?”

In 2014, William H. Scheide passed away, aged 100. An alumni of Princeton University in the 1930s, he bequeathed to the institution over 2,500 books and manuscripts he had amassed over his lifetime – the appraised value of which was reported in 2015¹ as $300 million.

Few of us will find ourselves in the position of leaving such a bequest – or indeed being the beneficiary of one. Yet many people write carefully considered wills allocating the remains of their earthly possessions to relatives, friends and charities, hoping that these gifts will provide some comfort or relief after they’ve departed.

So ingrained are wills and bequests in our shared cultures that they feature as a common trope in film, television and literature. The collection of books, the library of vinyl albums – even the shoe-box of precious photos all loom large in the common expectations of things left behind.

All of these things have one important feature in common – they possess physical form. You can touch grandmother’s precious baby photos. You can lovingly flip through aunt Mabel’s jazz record collection and place one on the turntable; you can open your father’s copy of Dracula and marvel at the notes he scrawled in the margin before you were even born.

The physical reminder allows us to connect (albeit indirectly) with those who are no longer with us. It is a gateway to the past (recent and longer-term) that we can access to satisfy anything from idle curiosity to a myriad of different emotional states. When the deceased was famous or otherwise notable, these physical remnants become part of our shared species’ history, too – paintings hang in art galleries all around the world, and museums host journals and manuscripts, giving us an insight into the mind and world of someone long-departed.

Yet we now exist in an increasingly digital world. How can we reconnect to aunt Mabel if her jazz collection was just a streaming service play-list and her account was deactivated 12 months after she stopped using it? How do we peruse grandmother’s photos when they were automatically purged from the cloud provider’s servers 60 days after she stopped paying her premium storage subscription? And if no-one knew dad’s Amazon password, will anyone be able to access his extensive Kindle library?

As we move from a period of physical possessions to more and more digital purchases and subscriptions, that which we are able to leave behind is potentially quite limited compared to previous generations. And while the digital world allows us to store more memories than ever before, it also increases the risk of complete erasure after we’re gone.

Digital services have a running cost associated with them. Some vendors offer free (or at least free-tiers of) services supported by advertising revenue, but more extensive use requires payment. Apple’s iCloud service for instance provides just 5 gigabytes (GB) or storage for free; beyond that, users must either eschew hosted storage or pay for extra capacity. Such capacity is not provided in perpetuity; users must pay a recurring monthly subscription, and on the occasion of their death it’s reasonable to assume those payments will eventually stop. At which point, provisioning software within the service will eventually flag the subscriber’s content for deletion.

While ongoing access rights are more obvious with subscription services (the right to use content ends when the subscription ceases), the rights conferred with digital content purchases are not always grasped by buyers.

It is common for digital purchases to be non-transferrable, either in life, or post-death. A digital copy of a board-game for instance, cannot be usually be given, sold or even loaned to someone else. Whereas vendors have been unable to exert much control over second-hand sales, gifting and loans of physical purchases, this is not the case in the digital realm. In short, while the options associated with a physical purchase are difficult to restrict, digital purchases are often based on the concept of limited usage rights:

Traditionally, whenever you purchased a digital game, what you tended to get in exchange for your money was a perpetual licence to access the copy of the digital game you purchased. You did not actually acquire ownership of the copy of the game you purchased. This is an important distinction as it meant that your right to sell that copy was limited, or as was almost invariably the case, completely prohibited, by the terms of the licence that was granted to you.

Is it legal to sell second hand digital games?, Nic Murfett, 10 October 2013, GamesIndustry.Biz.

Such restrictions are not technically hidden – they can almost always be found in the terms and conditions associated with the services. For example, Apple’s terms and conditions, in reference to intellectual property provisions expressly states:

No portion of the Content or Services may be transferred or reproduced in any form or by any means, except as expressly permitted by this Agreement. You agree not to modify, rent, loan, sell, share, or distribute the Services or Content in any manner.

Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions, sourced January 2022 from https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html

Rather than providing a mechanism for transferring content between account holders (e.g., for stated beneficiaries in a will), service providers such as Apple may enable the provision of a Legacy Contact – nominating one or more persons who can access your data and purchases after your death (once suitable proof has been provided). However, even in these situations, access is not perpetual:

Legacy Contact has access to your data for a limited time — three years from when the first legacy account request was approved — after which, your account will be permanently deleted.

How to add a legacy contact for your Apple ID, sourced January 2022 from https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT212360

While an obvious solution to the challenges surrounding digital ownership is storing account login details for use after your death, sharing these details (and keeping them up to date) in any meaningful way has the potential to create considerable data privacy issues within services – even if we assume that this is actually permitted under terms of service.

Privacy is a key focus for many service providers. Some companies, such as Facebook, have a somewhat laissez-faire approach to privacy, while others, such as Apple, promote user privacy as a key tenet of their service. Yet regardless of whether digital services jealously guard your data or sell your algorithmically determined interests to advertisers, they all exhibit some level of access control for your accounts. I.e., in theory, they strive to prevent unauthorised people from accessing your account. On a normal day, that may mean preventing Russian troll farms from seizing your Facebook profile to promote Ivermectin and election conspiracy theories – but after your death it may equally prevent your spouse or child from accessing your account to let people know you’ve passed. Password vault solutions can offer a centralised mechanism for granting access to your accounts once you’ve died, but this still takes preparation and requires appropriate security:

If you use a password manager like 1Password, you could explain to your loved ones how to log into your account. The easiest way is to write some instructions and leave them in a personal safe, alongside your traditional will, or with whoever manages your will, such as an attorney or estate-planning company like Trust & Will.

Digital estate planning: How to tranfer your digital accounts, Nick Summers, May 12 2021, 1Password.

Other methods proposed by the password management service include the use of vaults, so that you can pre-share select passwords with trusted individuals without having to hand over all stored login details. Such an approach has merit – after all, even if a person needs to share their logins for online banking with a beneficiary, many people have private accounts they won’t want ever exposed to anyone – particularly a grieving friend or relative.

When we die, we effectively cease to exist in the physical world. We may be buried, turned to ashes or placed in a mausoleum, but we are not as ‘instantly accessible’ as we once were for people to interact with us – or even our remains.

In a modern, digital context however, this line can blur. Friends and family can still visit your social media profiles for instance – and this can be perceived in radically different ways amongst those who are left behind. This also raises the question, ‘who owns grief?’; when the grieving process enters a more public (digital) forum than the physical, how does this change how we grieve, and how much more do we become aware of the grief of others?

Juliana Ribeiro Campos, a Brazilian journalist, died in May 2012 from complications following surgery. While Juliana’s friends and colleagues no doubt found comfort in continuing to engage with her social media profile as part of their grieving process, it caused anguish to her mother:

“This ‘wailing wall’ just makes me suffer too much,” Juliana’s mother, sociology professor Dolores Pereira Coutinho, earlier told the BBC.

“On Christmas Eve many of her 200 friends posted pictures they had taken with her and recalled their memories. She was very charismatic, very popular. I cried for days,” she said.

Facebook removes memorial page of Brazilian journalist, BBC News, 25 April 2013.

This shared yet incompatible grieving process led to lengthy period where Juliana’s mother tried to get Facebook to remove her daughter’s profile, before finally a judge ordered the social media company to delete it.

There is no doubt that Juliana’s passing caused significant grief for her mother – but does her grief automatically supercede the grieving process of others whose lives she touched? Clearly a judge felt this was the case. Before social media, ongoing grief was typically a private affair. Emotions though are deeply personal and subjective, and in a digital world where grief can play out more publicly than many of us are used to, this creates challenges for everyone who inhabits that sad, shared circle.

In response to the thorny and sensitive issues surrounding our digital presences following death, social media companies such as Facebook have established protocols that can help to deal with the situation. This includes methods of officially confirming the death, converting the deceased’s profile to an “in memorial” one or if the user had nominated it, deleting their profile, or some other permitted activity. One goal of this is to avoid the embarrassing (for Facebook) and distressing (to the bereaved) situation of seeing advertisements for products or pages on the site accompanied by personalised suggestions – “Jenny likes this”, despite Jenny having died a year ago. (Equally, profiles marked “in memorial” should not appear in suggested friend lists.)

Yet this is still a process fraught with challenges and where legal issues are regularly being contested. In July 2018, Germany’s highest court ruled that the Facebook profile of a 15 year old girl who had been struck and killed by a train was part of the inheritance that (as a minor with no will) automatically became the legal property of her parents. The court ruled:

The contract with Facebook was part of the parents’ inheritance, and they should therefore be given complete access to their daughter’s account.

Just as books and letters are passed to heirs, so should the data, presiding Judge Ulrich Herrmann ruled, saying there was no reason to treat digital content differently.

Facebook: Court rules parents have rights to dead daughter’s account, Deutsche Welle, 12 July 2018

Sadly, memorialisation and deactivation options for digital presences are also subject to abuse from online trolls. Instagram allows for user accounts to be locked once it has been officially notified of their death (and verified). This has been used to harass users – and was manipulated to prove a point that the functionality can be abused by convincing Instagram to accept a faked obituary as proof that an account should be locked:

A scammer managed to temporarily lock the Instagram account of Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, by pretending that the executive was dead

Scammer Convinced Instagram That Its Top Executive Was Dead, Joseph Cox, 11 October 2021, Motherboard by Vice

The amount of data we store (or have stored about us) online during our lifetime can be orders of magnitude more than might have been recorded by someone before the digital age. The notion of the prolific personal-journal writer leaving behind decades of thoughts and opinions usually seemed fanciful and otherworldly, and often confined to the sphere of notable politicians, civil servants, authors and journalists. Anyone can now leave behind a legacy of thoughts, photos and memories; pioneers of the blogging movement have already been active for over two decades².

There is at least some increasing awareness of the need for people to consider the disposition and ownership of digital possessions and presences after they’re gone. OneWill, an Australian online estate planning service advises:

The digital content that comprises your Digital Assets have value – photos of you, words you’ve written, media you have purchased – and anything of value you own, real or digital, forms your Estate. If you don’t give proper consideration to your Digital Assets after you die, they may be lost or misused.

Digital Assets – How Do I Include my Digital Assets in my Estate Planning?, OneWill Library.

We can also see some traditions regarding death evolving from physical-realm approaches to the digital. It is not entirely uncommon, for instance, for people to leave letters or other personal messages to be given to individuals who outlived them. Sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, these communications from beyond the grave can have significant meaning. Parents with terminal illnesses have left letters to be given on each birthday for their children. Spouses have left loving missives or post-death confessionals, and in some instances people have chosen to burn bridges that they’ll never need to use again.

It’s no surprise then that this has continued with the digital world. Services have sprung up (and in some cases themselves been not long-lived) that allow subscribers to send emails or even videos to people after they’ve died. Usually, such services operate via a digital “dead man’s switch”, periodically sending the author of the message(s) a link to click on to verify that they’re still alive. If they fail to do so (or perhaps fail multiple consecutive checks), the release is triggered. Simplistic approaches that use no means of external verification contain risks, however. What if the message author has since developed dementia, or has been involved in a significant accident? Alive, but unable to confirm their status, a service operating only via a dead man’s switch could cause discomfort or even serious problems to the author and the intended recipient(s).

Staying ‘in touch’ with the dead is not new, but is likewise adopting to a digital world. Some families traditionally keep a ‘shrine of remembrance’ for important, departed relatives in their houses. The modern equivalent might be a digital photo-frame playing a slide-show of cherished images. People go beyond votive spaces though, talking quietly to their departed loved ones as part of the grieving process – telling them of life-events (significant or mundane) over the months and sometimes years after their loss. This has carried through to the digital, with posts onto memorial profiles and even message services being used to still give personal updates.

In what some might consider a ghoulish evolution of the Ouija board, some companies:

such as Eternime and LifeNaut now even offer ways for the dead to be digitally resurrected using artificial intelligence.

Bereaved who take comfort in digital messages from dead loved ones live in fear of losing them, Debra Bassett, March 13 2019, The Conversation.

People have long sought ways to cheat death, and the digital realm offers new frontiers in this space – either by exploring possibilities for uploading our consciousness before we die, or creating digital shadows of our former selves. In essence, this emerging technology sector explores the overlap between spirituality, death and transhumanism. LifeNaut for instance claim to be:

[A] web based research project that allows anyone to create a digital back-up of their mind and genetic code. The ultimate goal of our research project is to explore the transfer of human consciousness to computers/robots and beyond.

LifeNaut Homepage, Sourced January 2022.

While an AI-based system may eventually be able to successfully imitate someone based on detailed data about their lives, true continuity of consciousness across the physical to digital chasm is no doubt a topic that will be debated for centuries, regardless of what proponents manage to achieve.

Digital resurrection is not confined to the personal sphere. Despite having died in 1994, Peter Cushing’s role of Grand Moff Tarkin (Star Wars: A New Hope, 1977) was artificially reprised by studios in 2016 for Rogue One: A Star Wars Movie. Digital resurrection is even a topic of exploration within the movie industry. The movie Marjorie Prime for instance centred around:

A service that provides holographic recreations of deceased loved ones allows a woman to come face-to-face with the younger version of her late husband.

“Marjorie Prime”, Internet Movie Database, sourced January 2022.

Such is the growth in AI-driven video/audio editing and manipulation that are likely to see more deceased actors conscripted back to film. MIT and Mozilla released a deep-fake video in 2020 showing just how powerful digital resurrection technology has become – providing a supposed video recording of Richard Nixon reading his famous 1969 “in case of moon disaster” speech³. This project was undertaken to highlight the risks of deep-fake videos, and shows the possibility within the technology to use digitally resurrected public figures to manipulate current events via supposedly ‘unearthed’ footage. With the IT industry repeatedly pushing previously high-end computing functions down to consumer-level functionality as processing power increases, the premise of movies such as Marjorie Prime become more real – as does the option for home-grown deep-fake videos. In essence, we are entering an era where your likeness can be hijacked not only when you’re alive, but after you’ve died, too.

Many families have experience with a hateful or abusive relative being raised to near saint-hood following their death by grieving relatives who decide to gloss over sometimes extreme imperfections. Domestic and even sexual-abusers are venerated as having done no wrong – a sad consequence of the adage, “speak no ill of the dead”. We’re told that digital records run the risk of accentuating this by holding their memories in a pristine state for much longer than we normally would:

When it comes to grief, many self-help books recommend making a memory box filled with reminders of your lost love, but there is an argument that such a shrine could be detrimental for some people.

“One of the most powerful processes of grief or disappointment is the fact that our memories fade with time but digital evidence can keep us frozen in a period … That series of pictures taken on a wonderful holiday can become weapons in the hands of our inner critic. We can glorify who we were, who others were and the glamorous life we led.”

I lost a decade of photographs, Ann Molloy, 13 September 2014, The Guardian.

While this is certainly a risk – and weighs into the body-image and self-perception problems that can be caused by social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook, we can consider a different path. It might be suggested for instance that the potential for permanence allowed by digital record-keeping could allow the replacement of “speak no ill of the dead” with a better approach: “of the dead, speak only the truth”.

That said, those who speak of the ‘permanence’ of the digital record either gloss over or forget about the pay-for-use nature of many Internet services. Bloggers might generate decades of content on websites, but if this content isn’t captured and stored in a freely accessible way, that content may be lost when they cease paying their website and domain fees. Long-term technical blogger, Michael White announced in January 2021 to his readers he’d developed ALS. Following the onset of dementia he signed off blogging in January 2022, noting in his final post that his blog would remain online until its renewal time and then disapepar.

The “Wayback Machine”, or Internet Archive, seeks to provide some solution to digital erasure by crawling and archiving content from the Internet – a mammoth task as the amount of data generated continues to grow at an accelerated pace:

We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral – but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 25+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 750+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

About the Internet Archive, sourced January 2022 from https://archive.org/about/

Note however the description states important web pages. There is no guarantee that the Internet Archive will capture every blog written, every memory posted. Such a task would be economically unfeasible. People wishing to guarantee their digital presence remains accessible after their death need to take steps to ensure it.

Humans have been exploring handling the legacy, memory and possessions we leave behind for all recorded history, if not longer. Kings and Pharaohs have been entombed with their riches and favoured possessions. Politicians, celebrities and other notables have bequeathed at times vast sums of money and possessions to all number of relatives, friends and causes – be it for altruistic reasons, or a desire to influence how they are remembered. And what the rich and powerful have done has been echoed throughout the ages by every-day people, too.

The digital age retains many of the considerations of death faced by previous generations, but it also introduces new challenges (and new opportunities) that society is only just coming to grips with.

The opportunities are enormous – with appropriate forethought and preparation, we stand the chance to remember more detail about current and future generations than ever before. But digital erasure can be permanent and irreversible, and as we invest more of ourselves into the digital, eschewing the physical, there is also greater scope for loss, too.

Death in the digital age also challenges us to rethink how we process and show grief, and how it impacts others. Friends, colleagues, family and the public can now all occupy the same grieving space for a lengthy period of time, something previously only manifested for the spectacularly rich or famous. Does any one person have a primary right to grief compared to others? Spouses, parents and children would likely view this with a firm ‘yes’, but can we not find ways to accommodate the grieving process of others without forcing digital erasure?

Regardless of any questions we may have about “what happens when we die?”, we are, in the end, the sum of the memories and experiences we leave behind in those still living. Death in the digital age requires us to reapproach this legacy, both for ourselves, and those who survive us. And if we do it right, everyone can remember aunt Mabel’s jazz collection.

1. “Scheide donates rare books library to Princeton; collection is largest gift in University’s history”. Princeton University Communications, 16 February 2015.
2. Example: Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch
3. MIT releases deepfake video of ‘Nixon’ announcing NASA Apollo 11 disaster, Bonnie Burton, July 2020 for C|Net.