What happens online when you die?

• 1Digital privacy after death - What will happen to your online profile when you're gone?

  What is the future of your digital self?

  You might not know what happens when you die but you can control what happens online!

  You are filling the internet with status updates, image and video creating new digital dilemmas such as:

  • Whether you want to live forever online?
  • How to protect your privacy after death?
  • How to maintain your digital legacy?
  • Who to appoint as your digital executor?
  • Whether You Would Want to Be Digitally Resurrected

  New! What happens online when you die video

  

  Can you live forever online?

  

  Do you know the death policies of all your online accounts?

  • 
    Introduction

    Regardless of the online communities in which you choose to participate, the connected, communal nature of Web 2.0 has transformed the Internet itself into one big social network. In creating online profiles, commenting on blogs, posting photos and replying to message boards you have created a rich online database of yourself and your life experiences. This participation takes place within the familiar, open and ultimately human community of the internet, with people who share or have something to say about your thoughts and beliefs, and that interaction is so valuable and relevant because on the other side of that technological platform is a person.

    So is that interaction just as valuable if it is based on the things someone used to think and believe? However, just because that person has passed away physically, does that make their comments, or indeed their lives, any less valuable or any less relevant? At the same time, if you died would you want your 2007 uni self or your 2009 backpacking self speaking for you in the future?

  • 
    Digital Privacy

    The Internet and social media are all about making connections, so you need to be thinking not only about what happens to the information in your profiles when you die, but what happens to the information of others stored in your private messages or saved in your inbox. When you die, that once private information is no longer bound by the terms and conditions of your friendship, but by the terms and conditions of your email provider or social network ^[1].

  • 
    Death policies Facebook and Twitter

    Most of your social media and online accounts will have a policy which dictates what happens to your account when you die:

    1. By contacting Twitter, family or friends can download a copy of your public tweets and close your account. Your digital executor will need to provide their name and contact details, their relationship to you, your Twitter username and a link to or copy of your obituary.
    2. In December 2009, changes to their privacy policy meant that the people behind Facebook began deciding on your behalf exactly how comfortable you were about sharing your information, and with whom, while you're still alive and quite capable of deciding for yourself. Upon your death you'll not only have to worry about Facebook setting up public default settings, you'll also have your family deciding whether to deactivate, delete, download or memorialise your profile. To do any of this your family will still need your username and password.
  • 
    Death policies of major websites cont.

    1. If MySpace are sent proof of death they will cancel a deceased user's account.
    2. LinkedIn will also close your account if they receive confirmation of your death.
    3. YouTube allows your heir or power of attorney control of your account and all of the content.
    4. Google+ and Gmail will provide account information to family members at their discretion.
    5. Yahoo owns Flickr and both sites have a strict digital death policy where, upon receiving a copy of your death certificate they will permanently delete all of your accounts and their contents meaning no one but you can ever access them.
    6. Hotmail will send a copy of all email messages and a current contacts list to your family, before closing the account on request. While this can make it easier for your family to notify all of your contacts of your death, keep in mind this also means your family will be able to read all of your private emails, which may not only include revelations about you, but could also reveal personal information about others.
  • 
    Death policies of major websites cont.

    1. After receiving a copy of your death certificate eBay will close an account and delete all customer details from the eBay database.
    2. PayPal will need to view a death certificate before closing an account, and if there is money in the account a cheque will be issued in the name of the account holder.
    3. Match.com will block the account of a user who has died so that it is no longer visible on the site and your power of attorney will need to contact Match.com to retrieve account information.
    4. An eHarmony account will remain open until a family member or power of attorney contacts the site at which point eHarmony will close the account

• 2 Why you should get a digital will & a digital executor

  Three Facebook users die every minute

  At this rate that means that there will be 1.78 million Facebook accounts in limbo in 2011 ^[14] because the majority of those users hadn't prepared for their digital death. That's the equivalent of the population of Western Australia, and as users and status updates continue to grow exponentially, how many deceased pages will there be in 10 years? How will Facebook and the probably non-tech savvy families of these people manage this amount of digital content?

  1,780,000Facebook user accounts will be in limbo by the end of 2011.

  Maintaining a digital legacy & digital afterlife funding

  • 
    Introduction

    A physical will covers your wishes for your physical self as well as your physical assets after your death. But what about your digital life? Now that we live almost as much online as we do in the physical world we need to have a plan for managing our digital deaths too. In order to carry out your digital death plan you will need to create a digital will, as well as select a trustworthy digital executor to handle arrangements for your digital assets and digital legacy once you are gone. Just remember not to put the passwords for your digital assets in your actual will as wills are made public at death.^[15]

  • 
    Digital Will

    The Internet and social media are all about making connections, so you need to be thinking not only about what happens to the information in your profiles when you die, but what happens to the information of others stored in your private messages or saved in your inbox. When you die, that once private information is no longer bound by the terms and conditions of your friendship, but by the terms and conditions of your email provider or social network.The Internet and social media are all about making connections, so you need to be thinking not only about what happens to the information in your profiles when you die, but what happens to the information of others stored in your private messages or saved in your inbox. When you die, that once private information is no longer bound by the terms and conditions of your friendship, but by the terms and conditions of your email provider or social network.

  • 
    Digital Wills for business

    If you run your own business, your business will have its own digital incarnation and its own digital legacy to maintain. Likely to be more active than your own digital legacy, your business' digital legacy can be maintained by providing your executor with:

    1. An online company procedure.
    2. An up to date list of online accounts.
    3. Business plans.
    4. Instructions.
    5. A final message.
    6. Your business' digital death policy ^[2]
  • 
    Additional considerations

    Your digital self could still stumble at obstacles thrown down by the mediums you inhabit in death. For example, a social media site may go out of business, your profile may be lost from the site or the site may realise they simply don't have the capacity to maintain memorial sites, especially considering that in 2011, Facebook for example, already has 1.78 million deceased profiles.

    Or consider what would happen to your digital self if your digital executor died - do they have a digital will, and is their digital executor willing to maintain your digital self? And what happens when inevitable technological advancements make your photos, files, messages and profiles unreadable and obsolete?

  • 
    Intellectual property

    In most parts of the world, the right of publicity ceases when you die, at which time a person's identity can be available for public use. Therefore, even if you include in your will that you don't want your identity to be used after you die, there is often no legal basis to enforce these wishes.

  • 
    Digital legacy possibilities

    Digital legacies can do so much more than help families and friends grieve and remember. For example, the digital legacy of Eva Markvoort, a young Canadian woman who died from cystic fibrosis in March 2010 and started blogging in 2006 has made a difference to many by inspiring others to live their lives to the fullest, encouraging her followers to love and appreciate others, and raise awareness and support for the fight for a cure to CF. Eva's blog grew enormously in popularity and just over a month before her death she posted her final video telling her friends and followers 'My life is ending'.

    While Eva didn't leave a message for her family to post on her blog after her death, her parents have continued to post on her page to keep all of her fans up to date, and continue the battle to find a cure for CF as well as to promote organ donation worldwide.

  • 
    Digital undertakers

    Make sure your digital undertaker is:

    1. Trustworthy - Choose someone you trust completely to execute your digital estate after you die and who will respect your wishes.
    2. Distanced - If you choose your spouse or partner, there is a good chance they will die at the same time you do, or very soon afterwards. Plus, someone who is too close to you may find it difficult to delete files or profiles as you've asked.
    3. Capable - Your digital undertaker must have access to your log in details, be familiar and confident with the social media platforms you operate on, and have a reasonable capacity to outlive you ^[3].

• 3Personality predictors + artificial intelligence = Digital resurrections

  Digital death day - Trying to find answers to our digital dilemmas

  When the Digital Death Day conferences were held in Europe in November 2011 it was the fourth time that attorneys, entrepreneurs, funeral directors, estate planners, researchers, archivists and leading thinkers gathered to have the conversation about the issues of family, privacy, digital property rights as well as archiving and curating data for anthropologists and future generations.

  Digital Death Day calls itself an 'unconference' where all of the attendees work closely together to explore options for dealing with online profiles after death. Everyone is able to contribute to discuss what death really means, when life has become largely digital.

  You're dead your data isn't

  How you could live forever... online

  • 
    Future of our digital selves

    Where do you see yourself in 100 years? We have the opportunity to be the first generation to realistically think about that question. How you are memorialised 'After Your Final Status Update' was the title and topic of Adam Ostrow's presentation to the TED Global 2011 conference ^[4]. The editor in chief of Mashable.com discussed the possibilities for the one billion of us around the world with social media profiles, as machine learning technology combined with the massive amounts of data we share publicly, makes it entirely possible that you could live digitally forever.

  • 
    That can be my next tweet

    'That Can Be My Next Tweet' analyses the DNA of your past tweets, to create short sentences and updates which, even if they don't make a lot of sense, still sound a lot like you, giving you a taste of what it would be like to culminate your online presence in a computer program ^[5]. 'That Can Be My Next Tweet' is the first service of its kind which would allow your profile to go on tweeting after you're dead, but we can only expect these types of sites to become more common and more accurate through advancements in AI and thanks to the ever increasing amounts of information we share online.

    Hunch is a program which can access your Facebook and Twitter accounts to predict how you will answer a series of questions ^[6]. Currently Hunch has an accuracy rating of 83% in the US, and 75% outside of the US. With an 83% accuracy rating in 2011, in 100 years time you could be sharing your thoughts, likes and pastimes with future generations.

  • 
    Your mind file

    One of the options Ostrow mentions in his presentation is the eventuality of downloading our digital selves into a robot to allow our families and friends to continue to interact with a tangible version of ourselves, or for a truly sci-fi approach to your digital afterlife the data in our online profiles can be used to generate a hologram of ourselves to be projected, transported and updated anywhere, anytime. You can start this process now by creating a mind file, where you upload biographical pictures, videos and documents to a digital archive.

    Through analysis of the information in your mind file, systems such as Life Naut you can create a computer based avatar which interacts and responds in the way it predicts you would in real life, having learnt your attitudes, values, mannerisms and beliefs, and by connecting with others who have stored their mind files in the same way.

  • 
    What would your profile say about you

    Journalists have always interviewed the family and friends of the deceased when someone dies in a newsworthy way ^[7]. However, it is not only journalists who will look to others for meaning and information in the event of your death, so before your family and friends turn to your online profiles for answers, consider whether your digital self will in fact raise new questions.

• 4The challenge of digital preservation

  Keep a child alive - celebrities commit digital suicide to save lives

  The Digital Death Campaign to 'Keep a Child Alive' began on World AIDS Day, 1 December 2010, with the world's most followed celebrities sacrificing their digital selves. The celebrities' Facebook and Twitter profiles went silent until a donation of $1,000,000 was reached to bring their online selves back to life.

  You can also sacrifice your own personal digital life and encourage donations to the Keep a Child Alive campaign, and bring yourself back to life online. In this way you don't have to wait until you die to leave a digital legacy, and have your digital self make a difference in the world, as you can use the power of social media to save lives now.

  Celebrity online profiles go silent to 'Keep a Child Alive'

  Digital archaeology & the future of examining the digital past

  • 
    Introduction

    A person who goes through their life without questioning their thoughts and actions and without allowing others to do the same is not learning or experiencing anything new and therefore is not really living. How is it that we know about this insightful philosophy? Because over two and a half thousand years ago someone thought to record the musings of a man named Socrates, but more amazingly, during the last two and a half thousand years someone else has decided to keep that record alive.

    Creating a digital representation of our physical selves sees us all living a highly examined life. As we post our thoughts and questions to elicit response and discussion from friends and family we are also able to look back on the things we've said and done in the past in crisp digital clarity.

    Our lives will always be examined, as we use lessons from the past to succeed in the future. Archaeologists will still gather the same information about our diets, relationships, social interactions and pastimes. However, digital archaeologists will be swapping their picks and brushes for data files and coding, and instead of struggling to piece together tiny scrap of artefacts, they will have more information and more detail than ever before ^[8].

  • 
    Digital archaeology

    Studies of human behaviour and human history are just as interested in day to day life and interactions as they are in the turning point moments of each generation. However, just because all of the seemingly mundane information about everyone's everyday lives permeates every facet of our lives now, it may not be around forever. Instead, digital records should be treated like an oral history, recognising the fleeting and fragile nature of the information, and the fluidity of the medium

    Whilst archaeologists are in danger of being overwhelmed by the volume of data we are all creating every second of the day, and in 100 or 1,000 years, how will they know what information is important to our cultural heritage? Unless...our digital selves were there to tell them...?

  • 
    What will digital archaeologists look for?

    In order to draw meaningful conclusions from the information our digital selves are leaving behind, archaeologists will be looking at online text such as comments, status updates and blog posts. However, much of this information is left anonymously, or under an alias, and to make connections around these contributions archaeologists may use write prints. Write prints look at the vocabulary, the length of sentences, the words and punctuation patterns and common grammatical errors commonly used by each writer to make connections between writing all over the Internet ^[9]. Therefore, even though you may think you are posting anonymously, by using write prints digital archaeologists may have the ability to detect and make connections across a range of digital media.

  • 
    Pandora archive

    Under a contract with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the National Library of Australia developed Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage in 2003 and has been collecting historic online publications relating to Australia and Australians since 1996 as part of the Pandora Archive ^[10].

    As part of the Copyright Act 1968, the National Library requires publishers to include one copy of each edition of a work in the library. Most states around Australia also have this requirement, but it has not yet been extended to include copies of electronic publications. Unfortunately the vast amount of information published online has meant that the job of deciding which digital publications are worth preserving in the Pandora archive is a job which is just currently too big.

  • 
    Forgetting gracefully

    The Internet is such a valuable tool because it is always changing, updating and evolving. However, if we all decided we wanted our digital selves to live forever, the Internet would be in danger of being filled with more information from the dead than from the living. Therefore, just as old letters fade and old photos are moved from the mantelpiece to a box under the bed, perhaps our digital selves should be allowed to grow old gradually too.

    Building in a mechanism to allow us to digitally forget gracefully was the suggestion of Mayer-Schönberger in his book 'Delete', where he proposed that files should come with expiry dates so they would simply vanish or 'digitally rust' after a certain amount of time, unless we made a conscious effort to preserve them ^[11]. Several companies are taking up these ideas, for example a German business called X-Pire allows you to add an expiry date to images you've uploaded to sites like Facebook.

    It may not even be your family who keeps the rust off of your digital self; as the nature of the Internet has proven, when there is something truly exceptional to see, it is repeatedly saved and shared, so ideally the best contributions to the community of the Internet will be kept alive by the community itself.

• 5Interesting digital death related videos

  Adam Ostrow: After your final status update

  Adam Ostrow's incredible presentation at Ted Global 2011 - After Your Final Status Update

  Everlasting digital life (Hungry Beast)

  Do you want and everlasting digital life? Take a look at Hungry Beast's interpretation of what happens online after you die.

  Eva Markvoort's final goodbye - I love you all

  25 year old Eva says goodbye and sends her love to all of her blog readers as her long struggle with Cystic Fibrosis comes to an end. You can read about her legacy on her blog, 65 Red Roses.

  Goodbye from beyond the grave

  

  "Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote - the first part of the process of turning this from an active website into an archive." - Blogger Derek K. Miller, penmachine.com

• 6How much digital waste are you accumulating?

  Digital waste is destroying the environment

  Learning about digital wills, digital executors and digital undertakers is an important step in the digital age, however, very few people are even aware of the issues. Because there is neither a uniform approach nor clearly defined policy to dealing with deceased online estates ^[12] and we never know when death might strike, it is your responsibility to start cleaning up your act online now.

  Consider whether you ever read your university alumni email newsletter now that you are subscribed to more relevant industry news. Are you still receiving updates from wedding websites now that you're married? And the big one - take a long hard look at your emails. Which ones will you ever read again? Seriously.

  "Anti-virus software firm McAfee reports that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam emails sent annually equals the amount required to power over two million homes in the United States while producing the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as more than three million cars." ^[13]

  The Electricity used to power SPAM =

  3 million cars worth of Greenhouse Gas emissions ...
  ... enough electricity to power two million homes.

How do I start preparing now?

Like this infographic?

<a href="http://www.lifeinsurancefinder.com.au/infographics/an-illustrated-guide-to-preparing-for-death/" target="_new"><img src="http://www.lifeinsurancefinder.com.au/infographics/an-illustrated-guide-to-preparing-for-death/an-illustrated-guide-to-preparing-for-death.jpg" title="Guide to Preparing for Digital Death" width="550" /></a><br />Produced by <a href="http://www.lifeinsurancefinder.com.au/">Life Insurance Finder</a>

What would your digital legacy be like if you died tomorrow? The fact is, none of us really knows what happens to our spiritual self when we die, but whether you believe you'll be looking down on your loved ones from a better place, or there really is nothing for you after your last status update, your digital self is already out there, in the cloud, more far reaching and powerful than you could have ever imagined. Therefore take the opportunity to decide now, whether who you are online is really who you are in life, and if this is how you want to be remembered.

As confronting as it is to think about the afterlife, or simply what happens after life, a well lived life is one from which you will be missed. Therefore if there are friends or family you will leave behind when you die wouldn't it be nice to know you'll be able to touch their lives in a positive way after you're gone, and that your digital legacy has been preserved as the valuable social, historical and archaeological artefact that it is? That we all are?

Therefore, use the resources below to find out more about the issues surrounding digital death, how those issues will change and affect you into the future. You will also find listed below websites which can help you decide whether you do want your digital self to live forever and if so in what form. Once you've made these decisions you can start making arrangements to prepare for your digital death or afterlife.

Digital death services and reference sites

• 
  More digital death resources to learn & Prepare

  Websites:

  1. http://www.thedigitalbeyond.com/
  2. http://www.deathanddigitallegacy.com/
  3. http://digitaldeathday.com/
  4. http://buylife.org/

  Articles:

  1. Cyberspace When You're Dead
  2. The 'online life' after death
  3. Digital Death Day
  4. Digital Property - Planning for Death
• 
  Digital legacy and digital will services

  1. After Steps
  2. Asset Lock
  3. Entrustet
  4. Estate ++
  5. Executors Resource
  6. Life Ensured
  7. MentoMori
  8. My Web Will
  9. My Internet Data
  10. Secure Safe
  11. The Digital Undertakers
  12. Ziggur
• 
  Digital memorialisation websites

  1. 1000 Memories
  2. B Celebrated
  3. Chronicle of Life
  4. Gone Too Soon
  5. Legacy.com
  6. Life Book
  7. Life Naut
  8. Memorial Gardens
  9. Memorial Matters
  10. My Wonderful Life
  11. Remembered.com
  12. Sympathy Tree
  13. Remembered Voices
  14. Virtual Eternity
• 
  Other digital death related services

  Goodbyes videos:

  1. If I Die

  Funeral web broadcasting:

  1. Funeral One

  Make a book from your online profiles:

  1. Book of Fame
  2. Social Memories
  3. Ego Book

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