We’re
born, we create a Facebook profile and we die… but not our digital identity.
Nowadays the largest social network of the world gathers more than one billion
active users, and about 30 million of ghost profiles. It may drive to
embarrassing situations (e.g. invitation to wish to deceased profile happy
birthday!) and it raises the question of the respect of the private life and of
the right to oblivion. Obviously all that is very cheerful but one has to admit
that the digital afterlife is definitely doomed to become a current issue.
Memorialization
"Please use this form to request the memorialization of a deceased person's account. We extend our condolences and appreciate your patience and understanding throughout this process”, the site reads. Since 2007 Facebook has created a function allowing your profile to be turned into a “memorial” after you died.
Some accounts are shut down by the host website
following lingering inactivity or it can be deactivated by kin who know the login
details. Before 2007 Facebook remained mostly
hands-off concerning its users’ death. The site requires proof of the death
before sending the ghost profile into the digital limbo – which is actually a
first hurdle. Once it is completed, the profile is removed from the public
search results so that only friends can see and post on the wall. It is also
removed from groups it belonged to, and information like status or automatic
updates are suppressed… But Facebook never gives the login details to the
deceased’s family; it just deactivates it, dooming the ghost profile to roam in
the cyberspace forever.
Due to this activity, Facebook has become the largest virtual cemetery in the world. Ghost profile is often used to pay tribute to the deceased, giving rise to a flood of tokens - more or less sincere. “For some, a dead friend’s or family member’s abandoned profile might serve as a beautiful and appropriate reminder of its creator. But for others it might trend closer to a macabre eyesore in need of termination”, explains Kristina Sherry in her article entitled “What Happens to Our Facebook Accounts When We Die?: Probate versus Policy and the Fate of Social-Media Assets Post-mortem”. In previous years it was commonly accepted in the western society that emotionally detaching oneself from the deceased was the best solution to overcome grief; but “in the past 20 years, researchers have begun to explore the healthy benefits of maintaining a tie to the deceased... Considering this, Facebook appears to be a natural way for people to work through grief over the loss of a loved one”, claims the cyber-anthropology expert Michaelanne Dye. Nowadays new media makes our day… but also our nights.
Legal limbo
Think about how much time you have spent on your various digital accounts since you created them, you definitely will leave a lot of data behind but how can you control this content when you pass away? The Facebook generation now experience more and more their lives through social networks and they often use them since their creation about 10 years ago. User’s digital accounts thus have more and more value and they often are a post-mortem bone of contention: who owns your online pages when you die?
It’s about
e-reputation and respect of the private life, so inevitably this issue is
related to legal questions. Social networks companies own the service platform
and you can control the confidentiality of the content you post on but on the
public side only… It basically means that even if you choose to hide or delete
some of your digital assets, they mostly are archived in the platform’s
metadata. Facebook’s policy for example states there is no reason to release
login information to family or friends of the diseased profile. It could bring
some families to cope with very difficult situations like post-mortem bullying
on the profile of their loved ones or usurpation of digital identity for
example: this is an infringement to the respect of the private life and to the
right of oblivion. However given that this is a very recent field of contention
there are no precise legal norms for now; the only way to access login of your
dead loved ones is often the judicial way, but this is never simple to win a
trial against Facebook!
Faced with this increasingly problematic situation, the notion of “digital legacy” has popped up these last years. Now some agencies are doing business in the field of digital afterlife. La Vie d’Après (the afterlife), Entrust.net or My Wonderful Life for example help you to “plan the funeral you've lived for”, says the slogan of the last website. You can handle your death arrangements, record your last wills, upload your favourite photos and all your important or secret stuff in a “digital storage-box”, write your obituary and even design you own epitaph! Once it is completed you choose a trusty executor who will carry out you last wishes and will take charge of your digital identity after your death. Almost all these services are obviously paid for… before you die.
Hook up from beyond
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… you have probably created numerous of digital extensions of yourself. But did you ever think one day you could somehow survive through these digital applications? Imagine one second that people start to consider social networking as a legitimate even modest way to survive. It could drive our digital society to a kind of trans-humanist one; there are already some applications on how to do this.
“When your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting”. This is the slogan of a Twitter application launched in last February under the name of LivesOn. This application is actually a system of algorithms, which analyse your digital behaviour and your way to communicate online in order to replace you when you will pass away! Just like a robot.
Facebook has also launched an application which enables you to control what you want to leave behind. This is a kind of virtual will and testament quite simply entitled “If I die”. If you register you can choose your last status announcing or record one/several texts or video messages and entrust this content to three Facebook close relations. If you die these people will be able to issue these updates that YOU chose. The presentation video is quite offbeat : black humour or just a crucial lack of respect towards death, it’s up to you…
So then, the online post-mortem activity seems trendy. Numerous applications pop up on the Web in order to bridge the gap between the living and the death world. The platform DeadSocial is for example a real post-mortem numerical extension of yourself. It is dead simple : you register, you create content (video, text, photos) and you plan when and where (which platform, which account…) it will be released. So you can go on communicating with your kin after you passed away, even many years later! I can’t decide if it is an enjoyable progress or a frightening one.
Léa Douhard.
13/04/13
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