EP 950 Your Digital Life Lives on Long After You’re Gone

Here’s a podcast subject I bet you’ve never thought about. It did briefly occur to me as I continue to get birthday reminders from Facebook about friends I know who have died.  What happens to your digital life when you pass away?  Unlike previous technologies to preserve the dead–cemeteries, archives, photo albums, home movies–the internet is no longer something you visit and leave.  Many people will leave behind a daily account of who they were and what they were thinking. The vast necropolis is being built daily and the number of dead, say Facebook, accounts will over the next several decades outnumber social media accounts of the living.  This fact poses previously unconsidered concerns: who owns this material? what policies dictate its use and maintenance? will an ad-sponsored service have as an interest in maintaining those accounts when they are the digital record of people who no longer can buy products?  In 2019, then Twitter announced it would purge those accounts that had been inactive for more than six months.  What followed was an outcry by grieving relatives and friends and the company rescinded the policy.  Our guest, Carl Ohman, a digital ethicist at Uppsala University and the author of “The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care” joins us for a fascinating topic which goes beyond most checklists people have set up in preparation for death.

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