There Goes My Digital Legacy

Xiyue Yang

In Chinese culture, we have the tradition of burning joss paper to transform objects and money into the underworld for our loved ones to use. Essentially, it’s a way to remember someone. As we transform most of our daily activities online, the concept of memorialization is changing. The digitalization of mementos makes it easy to preserve one's voice, smile, and interactions with others. However, not many people consider their personal data and information stored on the Internet, which I call the digital legacy to be worth prearranging, nor do most tech companies. What happens to your photos on Instagram after you die? Anyone can Photoshop or CG your face to another body, and you wouldn’t even be able to defend yourself because you are dead. Tech companies are taking over the ownership of your digital legacy if no action is taken.

It wasn’t until the Facebook outage happened in October 2021 that I realized how panicked I was without a connection to the outside world through social media. I restarted my phone, reinstalled the App, and Googled if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. I was scared because I stored so many things online, too much probably. If I lose network connection today, then I lose everything. By everything, I mean all the photos I have taken since 2016, all the conversation history I had with my family and friends, and all of the contact information, including my parent because I stopped trying to remember phone numbers years ago. People have complained enough about how much we rely on the network, but what scares me even more is the fact that 90% of the evidence proves my existence is stored online. What will be left to the world once I die? I’m too young to have a house under my name, and the most valuable item I have is probably the MacBook I’m using right now. Some estimates claim that more than 8,000 Facebook users die each day (Ambrosino 2016). One day soon, the dead may outnumber the living, making Facebook the world’s biggest cemetery. If this is the reality of our future, can I decide who has access to my digital legacy? With this thought, I went on a journey trying to find out if I can prearrange the ownership of my digital legacy after my death.

The first question is, what is my digital legacy, and what should I include? To me, a digital legacy consists of information about who I am, what I do, and how I do it. The Facebook and Instagram posts detailing my college life in the mountains I have hiked and the cities I have traveled to. Google Drive contains most of my intellectual property which is some of my most intimate thoughts and ideas. My apple account, although helpful in getting into accounts quickly, then becomes another digital gateway to many of the accounts that end up representing who I am. Each of these digital legacies is a fragment of myself, and together, they draw the picture of who I am. People know me for the specific fragment of information I have shown, including my family. But I think our loved ones deserve a chance to know us from another perspective, and that chance is the ability to access our digital legacy.

The next step became technical – how can I preset a person who can access my account? I then started digging into the deep settings of each application. Most platforms such as Twitter and Snapchat can only have the account deleted or deactivated with legal proof of death of the account holder. Other tech giants like Google, Apple, and Meta started to invest in features such as Memorializing the account. Facebook specifically has a feature for users to decide if they want their account to be deleted or memorialized after death. Users can also designate a Legacy Contact who will have access to the data after the account holder passes away. Instagram and Twitter have a similar feature for the user’s account to be memorialized upon request, but no prearrangement can be made. Apple took a similar approach of setting up a Legacy Account before death that will have access to the files saved on iCloud with a valid access key.

Among all tiers of actions users can take to handle their data after death, Google has the most extensive options to choose from. The Inactive Account Manager of Google allows users to decide when Google should consider their account inactive. Users can also choose who to notify and what to share through authorized data access permissions or have the inactive account deleted. The categories of data include Contacts, Calendars, Drives, Mail, Maps, and more. This freedom of deciding ownership for specific data categories is an improvement that can be made to the prearrangement process, especially when most platforms have not incorporated such functionality. Google is giving the decision back to the users on how a deceased person’s legacy can be handled and prearranged properly.

Since not all platforms offer the option to prearrange my data access, the old-fashioned way of writing down the passcodes became the best solution. After researching the policy and procedure of different platforms, I thought I was ready to write a will and decide who can access my data but it is more challenging than I imagined. I sat there and thought: Who do I want to leave the information to? My parents? My sister? Or should I just delete it? If I delete everything, is it too cruel for my loved ones to never know the other side of me? Whose needs should I prioritize? Which part of me do I want to disclose and which part do I not? The afternoon I spent thinking through these questions and writing down the decisions turned out to be the most difficult part of this process. It made me start to reflect on my online behaviors, the good and bad ones, such as the time I wasted scrolling on Instagram and the countless inspirations I got from others. I started to question how I want to be remembered and how I should plan the time I spend on the Internet.

Metaverse is attempting to migrate a person’s life or most of the daily activities into the virtual space which will make our digital legacy grow instantly. It is urgent to start considering prearranging our digital legacy before it vanishes into the virtual space. This can be simple as grabbing a piece of paper and writing down the passwords for your social media accounts. The point is to take control of your digital legacy and offer a chance for remembrance.

Reference:
Ambrosino, Brandon. “Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard.” March 2016, BBC