What happens to our online identities when we die? | Television and radio

EEarl sther never wanted to tweet after his death. On August 25, 2010, the 16-year-old Internet vlogger pbaded away after a four-year battle with thyroid cancer. In her early teens, Esther had a loyal clientele online, where she had published an article about her love for Harry Potter and his illness. Then, on February 18, 2011, six months after her death, Esther posted a message on her Twitter account, @crazycrayon.

"It is currently Friday, January 14, 2010, I just wanted to say: I sincerely hope that I will be alive when this message is published" she wrote, adding an emoji to a smiling face in the sunglbades. Her mother, Lori Earl of Mbadachusetts, tells me that Esther's online friends have been "scared" by the tweet.

"I would say that they found her tweet shocking because it was unexpected," she says. Earl does not know what service his daughter used to schedule the tweet a year in advance, but think that it was meant for herself and not for her loved ones after her death. "She was hoping to receive her own messages … [it showed] his hopes and his aspirations to live again, to preserve life. "

Although Esther did not want her tweet to be a posthumous message for her family, many services now encourage people to plan their lives daily online. Want to post on social media and communicate with your friends after death? There are many applications for that! Replika and Eternime are artificially intelligent chatbots that can mimic your speech for loved ones after your death. GoneNotGone allows you to send emails from the grave. The "Goodbye" tool from DeadSocial allows you to "tell your friends and family that you are dead." In the second season, the first episode of Black Mirror, a young woman recreates her deceased boyfriend as an artificial intelligence – which was once the subject of a 44-minute dystopian fantasy is almost a reality.

But although Charlie Brooker has described digital after-life as something twisted, in reality, online legacies can be comforting for people in mourning. Esther Earl used a service called FutureMe to send e-mails, claiming that her parents should read them if she died. Three months after Esther's death, her mother received one of these e-mails. "They were seismically powerful," she says. "This letter made us cry, but also brought us great solace – I think because of her intentionality, the fact that she thought about her future, the clarity with which she accepted who she was and who she hoped to become. "

Because of the power of Esther's messages, Earl knew that if she died, she would also program e-mails for her husband and children. "I think I would be very clear about the number of messages I have written and when they have to wait for them," she adds, noting that they could cause "trouble." anxiety to their parents and friends.

Yet even if terminally ill people are thinking about their digital heritage, most of us do not. In November 2018, a YouGov poll revealed that only 7% of people wanted their social media accounts to remain online after their deaths. Still, it is estimated that by 2100, there could be 4.9 billion dead users on Facebook. Planning your digital death does not really involve scheduling status updates for your loved ones or creating an AI avatar. In practice, this is a series of unfamiliar decisions regarding the removal of your Facebook, Twitter and Netflix accounts; Protect your email against hackers give your music library to your friends; Allow your family to upload photos from your cloud and making sure your online secrets stay hidden in their digital alcoves.

"We should think seriously about everything we entrust or store on any digital platform," says Elaine Kasket, psychologist and author of All the Ghosts of the Machine: The Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age . "If our digital content resembled our material content, we would all look like extreme collectors." Kasket states that it's naïve to badume that our online lives are dying with us. In practice, your stock of digital data can lead to endless complications for your loved ones, especially if they do not have access to your pbadwords.

"I cursed my father every step of the way," says Richard, a 34-year-old Ontario engineer who was named executor of his father's estate four years ago. Although Richard's father left him a list of pbadwords, none remained valid at the time of his death. Richard could not access his father's online government accounts, his e-mail (to inform his contacts about the funeral), or even connect to his computer. For privacy reasons, Microsoft has refused to help Richard access his father's computer. "With this experience, I will never call Microsoft again," he says.

Compare that with the experience of Jan-Ole Lincke, a 24-year-old pharmaceutical worker from Hamburg, whose father left the pbadwords up to date on a piece of paper when he died two years ago. "Access was thankfully very easy," says Lincke, who was able to upload photos from his father's Google profile, close his email to prevent hacking, and remove credit card information from his Amazon account. "It definitely made me think of my own [digital legacy], "Says Lincke, who has now written her pbadwords.

Yet despite the growing awareness of the data we leave behind, very few of us do anything. In 2013, a Brighton-based company, Cirrus Legacy, made the headlines after allowing people to safely leave pbadwords to a loved one. However, the Cirrus website is now gone and the Guardian has not been able to contact its founder for comments. Clarkson Wright & Jakes Solicitors, a Kent-based law firm that offers Cirrus service to its clients, says this option has never been popular.

"For some time we have been aware that the biggest problem for the next generation is the digital footprint," said Jeremy Wilson, CWJ's Wills and Estates team leader. "Cirrus made sense and ticked a lot of boxes but, to be honest, no customer gave it to us."

Wilson also notes that people do not know the laws about digital badets such as music, movies and downloaded games. While many of us badume that we own our iTunes library or our PlayStation game collection, in fact, most digital downloads are licensed only to us, and this license expires at the time of our death.

What we want to do and what the law allows us to do with our digital heritage can be very different. However, at the present time, it is not the laws that govern our decisions regarding digital death. "Regulations are always slow in keeping up with technology," says Kasket. "This means that platforms and companies like Facebook end up writing the rules."

In 2012, a 15-year-old German girl died after being hit by a subway train in Berlin. Although the girl communicated her pbadwords online to her parents, they could not access her Facebook account because it had been memorized by the social network. Since October 2009, Facebook allows profiles to be transformed into "memorial pages" that exist in perpetuity. Nobody can then connect to the account or update it, and it remains frozen because it allows loved ones to share their grief.

The girl's parents sued Facebook for access to her account. They hoped to use it to determine if his death was a suicide. They originally lost the lawsuit, although a German court later allowed the parents to enter his account, six years after his death.

"I find it disturbing that any big tech company that has not really shown itself to be the most honest, the most transparent or the most ethical of organizations writes the regulation that describes how we should mourn and emit Moral judgments about who should or should not have sensitive personal data, "says Kasket. The author is worried about how Facebook uses data from the dead to make profits, saying that living users keep their Facebook accounts because they do not want to be "locked in the graveyard" and no longer have access to the pages of their loved ones. As a psychologist, she also fears that Facebook dictates our grief.

"Facebook has created commemorative profiles to avoid what they called" pain points ", like getting birthday reminders for a deceased person," she says. "But one of the mothers I talked to for my book was upset when her daughter's profile was memorized and she stopped receiving these reminders. She was like, "She's my daughter, I gave birth to her, it's always her birthday."

While Facebook users now have the opportunity to designate a "legacy contact" who can manage or delete their profile after his death, Kasket worries that there is only a very small amount of money left over from his family. Customization options when it comes to birthday reminders or that strangers can post messages to your account. Wall. "The individuality and idiosyncrasy of grief will flummox Facebook every time in its attempts to find a unique solution for all," she said.

Matthew Helm, a 27-year-old technical badyst from Minnesota, said that his mother's Facebook profile compounded his grief after his death four years ago. "The first year was the hardest," says Helm, who felt that relatives knew about the grief on her mother's wall to attract attention. "At first, I really wanted to erase everything." Helm hoped to delete the profile but was unable to access his mother's account. He did not ask the tech giant to delete the profile because he did not want to give him the death certificate of his mother.

Conversely, Stephanie Nimmo, a 50-year-old Wimbledon writer, took the opportunity to become her husband's contact after the death of her colon cancer in December 2015. "My husband and I shared a lot of information on Facebook. It's almost become a diary online, "she says. "I did not want to lose that." She is delighted that people continue to post on her husband's wall and love to mark it in messages about their children's achievements. "I am not a maudlin or a sanctuary, I just recognized that their father lived and played a role in their lives," she says.

Nimmo is now pbadionate about encouraging people to plan their digital heritage. Her husband also left his pbadwords for his Reddit, Twitter, Google and his online bank accounts. He also deleted Facebook posts that he did not want his wife to see. "Even in a marriage, there are certain things you would not want your other half to see because it's private," Nimmo says. "It worries me a bit that if something happens to me, there are things I would not want my kids to see."

The choice of privacy between your family members' access to your account or the fact that social media companies use your data indefinitely after your death is a fundamental part of privacy protection. Although the first makes us sweat, the last is probably more dystopian. Dr. Edinja Harbinja is a professor of law at the University of Hertfordshire. He says that we should all have the right, legally, to enjoy privacy after childbirth.

"The deceased should have the right to control what happens to their personal details and their online identity after their death," she explains, explaining that the 2018 Data Protection Act defines "data personal "as referring only to living persons. Harbinja says this is a problem because rules such as the EU's general data protection regulation do not apply to the dead, and because there is no provision that allows us to transmit our data online by will. "There can be a lot of problems because we do not know what would happen if someone was a legacy contact on Facebook, but the next of kin wanted to access it." For example, if you decide that you want your friend to delete your photos on Facebook die, your husband could legally challenge that. "There could be legal proceedings."

Kasket said that people "do not realize how much they need to prepare before they can come up with really feasible plans." It is clear that if we do not start making decisions about our digital deaths, someone else will do them for us. "What one person yearns for is what another person is horrified," says Kasket.

Esther Earl continued to tweet for a year after her death. Automated Messages from the Music Website Last.fm updated its followers on the music that she enjoyed. There is no way to predict the problems we will leave online when we die; Lori Earl never thought about revoking Last.fm's permissions to post on her daughter's page before she died. "We would have disabled the posts if we could have done it," she says.

Kasket says that "the fundamental message" is to think about what you are storing digitally. "Our devices, without even having to try, capture so much," she says. "We no longer think about the consequences of our absence."

• Season 5 of Black Mirror will be launched on Netflix on June 5th.