When a loved one dies, part of the difficult road ahead may include rummaging through attics, closets or desk drawers to collect and distribute keepsakes, saving important documents and cleaning out or storing the rest.
But what about sorting, saving or maintaining someone’s digital life?
“You don’t want to throw away an heirloom, but what happens with technology is oftentimes it’s like an infinite attic,” said Jed Brubaker, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor who researches digital afterlives. “There are endless chests to look through. There may be rooms you didn’t even know existed.”
As younger people with larger online presences than older generations — calendars, contact lists, banking and financial information, creative projects, photographs and social media posts — are faced with their own mortality, Brubaker studies the ways they get their digital affairs in order and how technology companies can better prepare the accounts for their demise.
Brubaker has been studying online lives post-mortem for years, including helping Facebook design its legacy contact feature, which allows a user to select someone to make decisions about their account after their death.
Few online platforms consider what happens to an account if the user dies, Brubaker said, posing a range of problems, particularly when, by some estimates, the average internet user has nearly 200 online accounts and produced more than 850 gigabytes of data per year.
“We’ve heard a lot of stories around people talking about a loved one dying and then you need to pay the mortgage but the mortgage is paperless so you need to get into their email account and their password is hard, but Gmail changed to two-factor authentication and when you log into that, you need to certify it through their email and that’s with their thumb print,” Brubaker said. “Accounts are becoming more and more secure and they should be, but we have this really interesting issue where tech companies are aggressively pushing us into other forms of authentication, but we’re not always considering what happens when a person dies, and the technology is changing so fast that it might be different by the time you need to consider it, anyway.”
“It was a nightmare”
Denver resident Paige Yowell learned the extent of postmortem care while grieving her father’s death in 2018.
Yowell, 31, was so overwhelmed trying to get her father’s affairs in order — some online, others in-person in his Nebraska town — she ended up quitting her job to take care of things as the executor of her father’s estate and his only child.
Sorting out all of her father’s online accounts — sometimes having to crack her dad’s passwords — was daunting, she said, and even more confusing when she realized many companies didn’t have any explicit protocols for how to deal with a customer’s death.
Processes such as providing a death certificate were not streamlined, Yowell said, and often required her to be in-person where she often was treated “like she had five heads” when explaining what she was doing. If she succeeded in closing an account, sometimes companies would send automated follow-up emails addressed to her father asking if he was sure he could live without the company.
“It was insult upon injury,” Yowell said. “I was grieving and then having to deal with this stuff. Arranging my dad’s funeral was stressful, but it pales in comparison to canceling these accounts and handling all of this stuff on my own. Companies need to have better policies or train their employees on what to do if they’re handling a customer’s death. It was a nightmare.”
Brubaker and fellow CU Boulder researchers intend to change the future of digital afterlife through a new five-year study executed with the help of a more than $500,000 National Science Foundation grant. The study, to start in a few weeks, will work with terminal cancer patients in Colorado age 50 and younger — a group Brubaker said has a different relationship to technology than many of their predecessors — and determine what kind of end-of-life digital planning would best serve them. Brubaker said he plans to use that information in future workshops for the general public.
Brubaker said he also hopes the research influences tech companies and online platforms in forming their end-of-life best practices.
“This is nothing short of trying to preserve the memories and legacies of who we are,” Brubaker said.
“Some evidence that you exisited”
Katie Gach, a CU Boulder Ph.D. student researching how people manage post-mortem social media data, was so interested in better advocating for the dead and their families that she became a certified death doula — someone who assists in the process of dying similar to the way a midwife helps with the birthing process.
“The death doula training validated for me a lot of the sense of being too far away from death in our everyday lives and that not being best for us,” Gach said. “It gave me permission to lean in closer to bereaved people in my community and say ‘you shouldn’t be alone in this.’ It gave me practical things to say and do. It gave me practical questions to ask in order to lean into what people are experiencing when they die.”
Gach said she was able to help her best friend whose partner died determine how much of his online life to keep.
“We’re in this really interesting place where people are starting to realize they do want to keep those things, but they don’t realize it until after the person has already died, and that’s when any legal structures are no longer accessible to have access to those things,” Gach said, noting that people she works with are often shocked to learn it’s strictly against Facebook policy to sign in to their deceased partner’s Facebook page and operate it as them.
Instead, Gach said, users should select a legacy contact — perhaps someone tech-savvy — who can manage certain things on a dead user’s memorialized Facebook page such as update friends with an obituary or monitor new posts on the page. The legacy contact can’t alter content posted by their loved one. Before their death, a person can decide to have the legacy contact delete the page after an agreed upon time, although Gach warns that will erase all traces of the person from Facebook, including private messages, photos and anything else family may want to keep.
“Our research shows photos are really important to people as they share and document their lives,” Gach said. “All of those records of their experiences and things they care about — people like to have those.”
Storing photos in a place family can access such as hard drives, cloud storage or photo albums tend to be better than relying on social media platforms, Gach said.
Gach recommended the following steps to get digital affairs in order:
- Use a password management system that can keep track of all your passwords or — less secure, but still viable — write them down somewhere safe
- Research what, if any, options technology companies have for planning for afterlife care
- Pick a legacy contact on Facebook and discuss what you’d like the page to be — a memorial, an archive, non-existent, etc.
- If loved ones are uncomfortable talking about death, a game such as the Death Deck is good for starting conversations in a light-hearted fashion
“I think it’s hard for people to fully wrap their minds around how loved they are,” Gach said. “What that means is the people who love you will probably want to keep everything of yours that they can. It may not seem like your Facebook profile would be meaningful… but it’s the main interface of communication you have in that given context so in the digital world … People will want to keep some evidence that you existed in that space in the same way they would keep an urn full of ashes or visit a gravesite.”
