What Should Happen to People’s Online Identity When They Die?
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This is a problem in general when you trust something to someone to keep confidential. When they die, it becomes part of their estate and it's not confidential anymore. I don't see why data stored in online services should be any different from data stored on your computer in your house. With the cloud, it's sometimes not clear where it's being stored anyway.
As for confidential data, it should be encrypted at rest, so that the decryption key disappears along with the deceased. No estate or court order can decrypt that data.
That is not an answer solution to many issues. For example, I am an attorney and sole practitioner, if I were to die unexpectedly my clients would be entitled to get their case files, confidential/privileged/work product documentation can't just disappear upon my death and as others have suggested my estate could be liable for that just as likely as my estate could be liable for the same documents being release to any 3rd party. Separate and apart from liability I could simply prejudice my clients case in the instance of litigation either due loss of documentation or disclosure of the same to 3rd parties.
And these are not just hypotheticals, I worked in an office building where another attorney died unexpectedly of a heart attacker while driving, and there was no real procedure in place, simply many in the building rallied and took the case files and helped his clients, but who knows what documentation was lost and never recovered, alternatively there was very likely all kinds of breaches of professional responsibility and liability exposure, despite the realities of the legal community rallying and doing their best in a bad situation.
> That is not an answer solution to many issues.
What happens to memory in our brain when we die? What about the things that only we know and never tell anyone else?
Isn't that a problem? Should we make an attempt to recover a person's memories from their corpse?
We've been dealing with irrevocable losses upon death ever since humans started doing other things besides eating and reproducing. Our online passwords and porn stashes are, generally, just another item on the list of things that die with us.
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My aunt, who was very much like a foster mother to me, died this year after spending 4 months in a comatose/vegetative state. Before that she had suffered a stroke which rendered her unable to write anything. So for the last couple years of her life, she was unable to leave behind her thoughts (I deeply regret not helping her use her iPad for that), and not even able to tell her family anything in the last few months, despite being able to see us and hear us.
We don't even have any recent pictures of her, let alone videos. I'm thinking of contacting her phone company and requesting if they could provide us with a recording from a random call, just so we can listen to her voice, but I doubt they will oblige.
Maybe Facebook doesn't want to deal with the messy papers and signatures involved in that.
Part of what needs to be addressed is "is what I write and what I control online part of my _identity_ or part of my _intellectual property_?"
No, a person inheriting the estate doesn't have the right to pretend to be Grandpa and collect social security checks or defraud people based on that identity.
Yes, a person inheriting the estate does have the right to take the collected poetry and essays that Grandpa wrote and publishing it. ... even if they are published on Facebook.
Are Facebook, Twitter, Github etc... in the first category or the second category?
Microsoft outlook has a neat feature to "send on behalf of" (account settings, delegate access). Such an approach would be something to consider for an online presence to distinguish who is doing the sending - the deceased or the estate.
Just because eg the person's wallet is now technical property of the estate, doesn't mean the identity information contained within (driver's license, credit cards, etc) now acts as a form of identity inheritance or transferal. That's not how estates work legally.
So simply handing over the account isn't a possibility, they'd have to remove the nonpublic communications first.
IANAL, but I don't think the law works this way. If you reveal any of that confidential information, you would be as liable to getting sued for breach of confidentiality as your father was. I believe this will be one of those cases where ignorance of the law will not protect you, beause it is common knowledge that what happened between your dad and his clients is confidential information.
Honestly I end up wondering how the legal system functions at all.
Today most nations including the US already have laws around Medical Records, maybe your father passed before these laws where in place but if his therapist records became "part of the estate" and you released them publicly you likely would be in violation of more than a few federal laws, and if your father stored those records improperly (which based on your description of the records that is likely) he would have also been in violation of Medical Records law. I going to assume his practice predated these laws, but situations like what you described are one of the reasons these laws were created in the first place. Simply because my Doctor dies does not mean my medical information is now public.
So no privacy is not a new problem, but it is a problem people need to take more seriously, not take the position you seem to have here which is "well it is always been an issue so lets not worry about it"
If the wife wants to friend the dead husband, I don't think it's so important "what he would have wanted."
They should prioritize the wishes of the next of kin, or executrix of his will, or whomever our traditions and legal system has figured out can make this decision.
We as a society came to these practices over many generations. They exist for a reason, and the way this is phrased, it seems Facebook is putting themselves in the position of reinventing the wheel for whatever reasons they have. Which may or may not be in the interests of the survivors of the deceased.
The initial property division is done by a will because it is the only neutral way to decide who is to divide up an estate and how they are supposed to do it. If Bob leaves his boat to his daughter Charlotte instead of his son David, that is much cleaner than having David and Charlotte fighting over it.
After the estate is settled, the heirs are free to do whatever they want with their inherited property. If Charlotte didn't really care for the boat but David really wanted it, she is free to sell it to him or gift it outright. Or she can sell it to a third party. Charlotte shouldn't feel guilty or pressured by a dead man to enjoy the boat.
Look at the context and consider a scenario where a will has a statement that Facebook should be deleted (or frozen or whatever). The comment I replied to implies the statement shouldn't matter if someone living wants something else.
My meaning was something like the whole concept of a will is about respecting and recognizing the priorities expressed by the dead.
I don't disagree with what you say about what people do with things they inherit, but you are imputing an awful lot of meaning to make that a contradiction of my sentence that I posted above.
I'm sorry if I misconstrued your use of the word wishes. I feel that the whole concept of a will is the best solution that we as a society have found for determining what to do with a person's possessions when they die. The dead can't expect their priorities to be acted upon without question since it is the living who have to deal with the consequences of those priorities.
>If the wife wants to friend the dead husband, I don't think it's so important "what he would have wanted."
A Will doesn't mean ignore the husbands wishes in favor of the wife/heirs, it means who ever is executor, wife or not, must comply with what the husband dictates.
We as a society haven't had the internet for generations yet to know how to handle this. Hence the article.
In the context of Wills, that would mean more people would transfer their estate before their death. In the context of Facebook, it would mean some people may delete certain data (or in some cases delete their entire account) if they don't want the data discovered after they die.
I'd rather think of it as prioritizing the plans of a living person that they want to "schedule" for their last moments on earth.
If we had a magical moment-of-death predictor, or brain-monitors connected to an instantaneous legal system, we could totally do that.
So in a way, the fact that most of the implementation of their "last task" occurs after death is an just a weakness in our implementation :P
https://research.fb.com/publications/legacy-contact-designin...
2. ???
3. profit
As a genealogy fan with known roots spanning centuries, at some point there no longer is any connection or feeling to a ggggf or gggg aunt.
I absolutely CRAVE to learn what life was like for my family. Why did one uncle hunt and send birds eggs overseas? Or one gggggm rode horseback to come to aid revolutionary soldiers? What battle?
Facebook probably will just be an archive 120 years from now. But a extreme long term policy will assist future genealogists. Something like "after 80 years past the death, all fb related data is available." after 25 years its available to direct line descendants.
This sounds highly troubling to me. Imagine being persecuted in your life because some ggggm whom you never knew about was an extremist (racist and what not - let your imagination run wild on how despicable that person was during their time). Your craving to learn about your family decades or centuries ago must not become an overriding factor for the entire society to abide by. The "right to be forgotten" [1], though not perfect, has a lot of value for humans.
On Facebook specifically, it is a highly buggy platform. Even as of yesterday, I couldn't get search to find recent content that I knew was there. I had to resort to other (slower and cumbersome) ways of finding it. This has been a long standing problem (several years). Content discovery in Facebook is terrible, and hence assuming Facebook to be the custodian of one's life experiences is a very, very poor choice, in my observation. Facebook is not the platform for archival!
That's a really great point. I wonder though - if the archive is this thorough and the attitude for which the relative is now being persecuted was widespread at the time, won't the archive be able to prove the counterpoint that the hypothetical ggggm was similar to most other people?
I'm sure nobody actively condones persecution of people in revenge for what their ancestors did. But if we sweep anything n generations back under the carpet, aren't we implying that anything less than n generations back is fair game for vendettas?
Well.. Everyone has someone who can be judged by current times.
I have no pictures to speak of; no writings; no videos; no future messages;
Just because its very time consuming to establish the past doesn't mean its not my family's past. Im not judged now because of it.
Really, can you name a better way to totally bore someone other than talking (for more than 4 munites) about one's family??
This wont be an issue, IMO
"Memorialization is our default action, but we know that some people might not want their account preserved this way. They might prefer that we delete their profile. Recognizing this, we give people a way to let us know they want their account permanently deleted when they die. We may also delete profiles when the next of kin tells us that the deceased loved one would have preferred that we delete the account rather than memorialize it.
Other people might want a friend or family member to be able to manage their profile as a memorial site after their death. That’s why in 2015, we created the option for people to choose a legacy contact. A legacy contact is a family member or friend who can manage certain features on your account if you pass away, such as changing your profile picture, accepting friend requests or adding a pinned post to the top of your profile. They can also elect to delete your account."
I also list out who needs to be informed -- who to contact directly by phone, who to email.
It isn't intended to be a will - it is more a list of the little details of my life that are not part of our shared existence, that would probably be forgotten in the turmoil, so I thought of them ahead of time.
I look at it a few times a year and keep it up to date. And I hope it is a wasted effort.
Procedure is in this page: https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?h... . The problem: It asks for a court order in the united states. No idea why the courts are even involved in this case, it seems like a basic civic issue, but the US seems to do a lot by court. Or not, I don't actually know.
So here we are, in grief, far from home, burial in a week, horrible mess to sort out, and google wants some legal papers from some court half the planet away, in a completely alien legal system where I even don't know what my basic rights are. Even if google has local presence in all of the countrys involved. No chance to fix that in a week.
I hope like hell we found most of his important friends.
Even so, if any googler happens to read this: Please fix that. I know you cant' give access to random strangers, but there's got to be a better way, involving at least the local legal system.
The solution with Facebook is simple: if you don't want to have a deceased person showing up on your feed, unfriend them and add them to your block list. Assuming Facebook is well-designed, blocking someone should prevent them from ever showing up in your feed, even if others are tagging them in photos or posting to their wall. As for your being aware that "the profile is still there and other people are interacting with it", get over it. It's not your place to dictate how others should deal with the death. You have the choice to not look; so don't look if you don't want to. Lack of self-control to not check back every month to see what other people are doing is not a valid reason to nuke the profile from orbit.
Speaking to the internet at large: the only way to mandate how companies must respond to news of a death would require tying every single page load on the internet to an official government ID. Nobody wants to provide their government ID to ThePirateBay and PornHub just so that their entire online identity can uniformly vanish upon death.
How many people burn their photo albums when a loved one dies, in order to remove all traces of that person? Nobody. Why should the digital equivalent be any different? More simply, why should an online presence be terminated? Just... "why?". I suspect every attempted answer to that question is born of self-centred excuses that have no merit; ie: based on "I" or "me" - "I don't want to be reminded", "It pains me to see", etc.
tldr; The whole think stinks of "Won't somebody think of the children?!", but instead it's "Won't somebody think of me me me me me?!". The level of absurdity seems equivalent to me.
It all becomes info out of context, photos and conversations between people whose confidence I would keep in life. Has value to me, but it should all be burnt when I go.
> When people come to Facebook after suffering a loss, we want them to feel comfort, not pain,
Lying cunts.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hollie-gazzar...
> The family of a young hairdresser murdered in a savage attack by her ex-boyfriend have repeatedly appealed to Facebook to remove photographs of the pair together.
> Nine images of Hollie Gazzard, 20, who was stabbed 14 times by Asher Maslin in February last year, are still visible online.
(They have, eventually, removed the images).
Facebook doesn't really change things, much as they might like to believe that people's lives hinge on their service.
In the case of death, there's the "new" issue that someone's Facebook account is basically an instantly-worldwide-accessible and permanent gravesite when they die. In the case of sudden death, there's a real issue of what that person would want on what's become an ad-hoc memorial site for perpetuity. And because it's a web service, there's the technical issue of access control, along with all the legal issues that have been around since the pre-Internet days.
Minimally:
Subscribe to the SSA Death Registry (or local equivalent), integrate the data. Set a flag in (potentially) matching profile(s). Put account into some kind of "might be dead" probationary state, for further adjudication.
Having worked on both medical and voter registration records, this is normal activity. Social media, email hosts, etc, should do the same.
[ ] send wishes automatically if inactive for 1 year
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22394223/ns/us_news-weird_news/t/d...
Unfortunately, the feedbacks wasn't so good, I had to shut it down.
I don't think any SINGLE social media company can solve this.
That way, your online identity gets to be like Jim Morrison's grave.
I believe 4chan has neither the taste nor the means to make something like that happen.