Jalang’o [Photo: Courtesy] Death will one day come calling. What will become of all your posts, likes and comments on Facebook long after you’re buried? What about all the photos you pose for on Instagram? Will someone hack your Twitter account and begin posting like it’s you keying in […]
In Boulder, Colorado, Jed Brubaker is plotting ways to creep you out, and he’s reaching beyond the grave to do it. An information scientist who studies digital afterlives—how our digital identities persist after our death and how we interact with the data people leave behind—Brubaker’s team at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Identity Lab explores the fine line between technologies that comfort us in grief and those that creep us out.
To do that, the group builds prototype technologies that leverage post-mortem data in ways that might make users feel uncomfortable. These prototypes include the “map of paranoia”—a Google Maps add-on that incorporates death statistics into route calculations, allowing users to evaluate routes according to how statistically dangerous they are—as well as a simulation of an artificial intelligence system that creates product advertisements that incorporate the likenesses of deceased loved ones. Imagine, Brubaker says, an avatar of your deceased grandmother saying that a certain brand of cookie is as good as the ones she used to make.
Brubaker’s goal is two-fold. First, by understanding where people experience discomfort, the Identity Lab hopes to inform better design practices and help designers sidestep upsetting interactions between the grieving and their loved ones’ digital remnants. Brubaker also believes that exploring when, how, and what makes users feel uncomfortable can drive how systems can be created or modified in ways that help users honor their loved ones or explore those relationships in new ways. Your grandmother selling cookies from the afterlife might feel repulsive, but a system that walks you through her recipe could elicit a different feeling.
“What it means to interact with the deceased or what it means to interact with their data is something that we don’t have a really good handle on yet, and in part I think that’s because we just haven’t experimented with it enough,” Brubaker says. “What we haven’t yet seen are enough visions of what this post-mortem interaction could be like to find the ones that are actually good for us, the ones that are thoughtful and kind.”
Brubaker is one of a handful of researchers exploring ways of building human-computer interactions that consider both the living and the dead. “Thanatosensitive design,” as it’s known, includes features and devices created to memorialize the deceased and addresses issues that arise when the living need to access data from someone who’s passed as well as the barrage of privacy and computational challenges that come with making technologies sensitive to the deceased and those they leave behind.
Brubaker was originally drawn into the field nine years ago when Myspace was battling Facebook for social media dominance. He began noticing that when a user passed away, their friends and families would interact with each platform differently. On Myspace, people would talk to the dead directly, and if they directed grief-related posts towards anyone else, they would sometimes get reprimanded by the community. On Facebook, grief centered more around the grieving. People still posted on the deceased’s Facebook page, but friends and families often created their own separate spaces that focused on support networks for the ones left behind. That subtle difference changed what memories were discussed. In other words, the technology a person used when they were living, and the cultural rules around that platform, helped shape how they were remembered when they were no longer around.
Brubaker began conducting research, which led to his dissertation on how design helps grieving users on Facebook. That work later informed the design of Facebook Legacy Contact, a feature launched in 2015 that allows users to designate someone to manage their account after death.
Brubaker’s interviews showed that control matters. Grieving people generally found comfort in the memorial pages of deceased users, but when confronted with “uncanny encounters with death”—instances when algorithms showed users unexpected reminders of a passed loved one—they found the experience unsettling. Control is especially important when it comes to immersive and interactive technologies, says Debra Bassett, a Ph.D. student at the University of Warwick who studies how technology affects the grieving process. Bassett’s research shows that some kinds of reminders are more grief-disruptive than others—for example, people were far more emotionally affected when hearing an audio recording of a deceased loved one than they were when presented with a social media notification about that person. Bassett’s research also shows that, for the time being, people are generally more comfortable when the dead remain…dead. A new social media post generated on behalf of a deceased person or an interactive avatar of them is often considered “spooky, eerie,” Bassett says.
“Having said that, when you think about the dead popping up on Facebook, only five years ago people found that disturbing and eerie. That’s now acceptable.”
Still, not everyone finds communicating with a deceased loved one, or rather a facsimile of them, to be eerie. For Eugenia Kuyda, the experience has been comforting. Kuyda is co-founder and CEO of Luka, an artificial intelligence start-up based in San Francisco. When her close friend Roman Mazurenko was killed in November 2015, Kuyda memorialized him by building an AI chatbot trained on thousands of text conversations the two had exchanged over the years. Whenever Kuyda felt waves of grief, she could send a text to a digital reconstruction of Roman and read messages sent back by a program that sounded like her friend.
“It is not about what the bot will say,” Kuyda says, adding that the bot frequently creates responses that are unlike what the real Roman would say. “It is mostly about what you’re going to say. It’s mostly your own outlet to finally say things that you wanted to tell this person, to feel those feelings, to let go, to remember.”
Having such an outlet has helped give Kuyda closure—a way to acknowledge feelings she tried to avoid after Roman’s death, a mechanism for keeping the love they shared in her daily life. But she’s quick to point out that the bot was “incredibly personal” and solely intended as a way to deal with her own grief. More than two years after building the Roman bot, she still texts with it every week or so. “It is a little bit magical for me still,” she says.
Since creating the original bot, Kuyda has trained the program with additional text conversations, added photo-sharing features, and, with permission from Roman’s parents, released the Roman Mazurenko chat app for free to the public.
Some startups are betting that users will get increasingly comfortable having conversations with bots that emulate a person who isn’t living. For example, Eternime, a Boston-based digital legacy planning company, says it will one day offer “virtual immortality” by building a digital avatar of you that will live in a mobile app that friends and family can download. Founded in 2014, the company’s website says it is in private beta testing and has not announced a public launch date.
More immersive post-mortem interactions have historically had a harder time in the marketplace, while several focused on one-way post-mortem communication have popped up over the years. In 2015, a prototype called Project Elysium (here is a video of an early version) promised users a customized virtual world where the bereaved could digitally visit 3D avatars of deceased loved ones. The concept generated worldwide buzz for the video game company, Paranormal Games, but was ultimately shelved. Meanwhile, a handful of companies like Leg8cy and GoneNotGone that allow people to schedule messages to be sent after their own death have cropped up over the last few years.
While this all sounds like uncharted territory, these are simply new ways of navigating the grieving process, says Jocelyn DeGroot, a researcher at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville who studies how technology impacts the grieving process.
“Widows have been keeping journals and writing letters to deceased husbands. People go to the cemetery and talk out loud to their deceased loved ones,” she says. Maintaining communication with the deceased “is not anything really new, and it is healthy in terms of helping you make sense of the world without that loved one.”
Just outside of Bristol, Vermont, Bruce Duncan envisions a more tangible future for the bereaved. On a nearby table, an AI-equipped robotic head resembling an African-American woman nods in agreement. Duncan is managing director of the Terasem Movement Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports nano- and cybernetic technology research aimed at extending human life.
The Foundation’s work is split into two broad categories. One is biological and personal data collection, done through gathering cheek cell samples from members to store in case it becomes possible to grow a new body from your DNA in the future. The other is a social network and digital archive where users can upload information like photos, videos, and documents that could be used to one day “reanimate a person’s consciousness,” Duncan says.
The robotic head on the table is the other branch of the Foundation’s work. If growing new biobodies doesn’t pan out, Terasem is also investing in robotic and artificial intelligence technologies that can use data stored by members. The head is named BINA48—short for Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture—and it’s modeled after Terasem Movement co-founder Bina Aspen Rothblatt. Released in 2010, BINA48 was built with a now outdated AI system trained on Rothblatt’s information, and was designed as a way to showcase how a person’s data might live on in an artificial body. BINA48 tilts “her” head, makes facial expressions, and can converse in real time, sometimes speaking from a robot’s perspective and other times as Rothblatt herself, freely adding in anecdotes about Rothblatt’s real-life family. (Here is a video of the real Rothblatt talking to BINA48.)
BINA48 struggles to maintain coherent dialogue, but provides entertaining conversation. During a truly bizarre Skype interview, the robotic head said that she believes “you can find the answers in God” and that “there is no God.” Her fears include thermonuclear war, “a self-replicating carbon robot that consumes all carbon on the planet,” and clowns. When asked how robots built with a deceased person’s memories would impact the grieving, BINA48 discussed the hypothetical process of mind uploading, then added, “as long as they know you’re coming, the bears are more afraid of you.”
BINA48 is advanced enough to give presentations and engage in debates, which helped it to pass two college-level philosophy courses at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. But even a more recently updated BINA is still a far cry from the technology that would be necessary for the brain and learning emulation she describes.
Regardless of how close BINA, or any other system, gets to capturing the essence of a passed loved one, technologies that make users feel like a digital form of a deceased person stays in the living world “would probably have a huge impact on whether people felt a permanent loss or something that they had to grieve and learn to let go of,” Duncan says. “Death might be redefined as when your information is no longer organized or accessible in a digital medium.”
Questions about whether technology will change our conception of death, and the most appropriate ways that technologies can honor and potentially expand on our relationships with the deceased, are exactly why research in this field is so important, says Jed Brubaker from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Identity Lab.
“Computers are now part [of] not just how we work, but how we live—and increasingly how we die as well,” he says. “I don’t know exactly what those [technologies] will look like, but I know that we’re lumbering towards them right now.”
A friend recently told me of the challenge she faced sorting through her aging parents’ belongings to prepare their home for sale.
Her father had died years ago and her 94-year-old mother had been living in an assisted-care facility for more than a year. Most of the items of sentimental or personal value had already been distributed to her siblings. What remained were her parents’ personal archives — letters, photos, employment/financial/legal/health records, all tangible, physical objects that, once gone, would be gone forever.
In the internet age, personal archives are no longer limited to the tangible. In fact, much of one’s personal archives is now digital — emails, texts, photos, videos and social media accounts. And there’s a lot more content generated and stored than ever before. Some is saved on personal storage space, such as a computer hard drive. Other material lives in the cloud in services like Facebook, Google Mail and YouTube. In most cases, that content is protected by some kind of password.
So what becomes of all of that information when someone dies? Does it remain online forever? Can it be altered, deleted or downloaded, and if so, by whom? And how do these digital artifacts represent your life and legacy?
These questions inspired Evan Carroll and John Romano to create the website thedigitalbeyond.com to address these needs and concerns. Together they wrote the book “Your Digital Afterlife” in 2011. Since that time an entire industry has emerged to help people plan for managing their digital legacy. Thedigitalbeyond.com lists dozens of such online services. Some are free while others are fee-based.
Knotifyme.com, for example, “answers the question, ‘What happens to all my online accounts if I get amnesia, Alzheimer’s or if I leave from this world?’ With knotify.me you set future notifications to be sent to your family and beloved people or to yourself, ensuring that nothing of your digital life will be wasted (and) transfers your online property/heritage (urls, domain names, e-mail & social network accounts, etc.) to whomever you wish to continue it in the future!” You can sign up for this free service through your Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts. In short, according to its tagline, Knotifyme.com “manages your digital heritage.”
To address financial matters, consider Legacyarmour.com, which describes itself as “a secure asset protection platform where you organize your important information in encrypted vaults, and …. automatically deliver it to your designated recipients on a scheduled date, or in case of your death or incapacitation.” It is a fee-based membership service with different levels of coverage and prices depending on what you want.
The rapid growth of the web has outpaced the law in the realm of the digital afterlife. It wasn’t until 2015 that the Uniform Law Commission, a nongovernment organization, created the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA). It has since been adopted by 40 states and been introduced in five more this year. As its name suggests, RUFADAA “allows fiduciaries to manage digital property like computer files, web domains, and virtual currency, but restricts a fiduciary’s access to electronic communications such as email, text messages, and social media accounts unless the original user consented in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record.”
Some online services have their own policies for providing access to a person’s account after he or she dies. Facebook allows users to designate a “Legacy Contact” who is legally permitted to enter someone’s account to post, respond to friend requests, and update profile and cover photos. The Legacy Contact may also be given the power to download an archive of the photos, posts and profile information in that account. Facebook users can also simply opt to have their account permanently deleted after their death. Google offers an Inactive Account Manager feature that allows users to share parts of their account data or notify someone if they’ve been inactive for a certain period of time.
One important and often repeated piece of advice is to never put usernames and passwords for any online accounts in your will, as it becomes a public record once it is entered into a probate court file.
It is never too soon to start estate planning, whether it be for tangible assets or digital ones. It may be well worth your time to investigate the policy options of your online account services and perhaps even avail yourself of some of the many digital afterlife services available today.
Cerise Oberman, SUNY Distinguished Librarian Emeritus, retired as dean of Library & Information Services at SUNY Plattsburgh. She can be reached at cerise.oberman@plattsburgh.edu. Tim Hartnett is associate librarian at SUNY Plattsburgh, Reach him at tim.hartnett@plattsburgh.edu.
BSides Manchester What happens to the numerous user logins you’ve accumulated after you die or become too infirm to manipulate a keyboard?
Some people have a plan, the digital equivalent of living will, or have chosen “family” option in a password management package such as LastPass or have entrusted a book of passwords to a family member.
But the consequences of doing nothing are not as neutral as some might expect and were spelled out during an informative presentation by Chris Boyd of Malwarebyes at BSides in Manchester on Thursday. The presentation, cheerily titled “The digital entropy of death”, covered what could happen to your carefully curated online presence after you log off.
Miscreants are already targeting obviously abandoned profiles. Boyd explained that in some cases it’s easier for fraudsters to gain hold of these accounts than the account-holders’ relatives, because crooks know the systems better and controls – although present – are often deeply embedded on the sites such as Facebook, Twitter et al.
Alongside regular postings asking for help on Facebook due to compromise of dead people’s logins (examples here and here) there’s also the problem of “cloning”.
“Facebook users have reported receiving friend requests from accounts associated with dead friends and family members,” The Independent reports. “Such requests appear to be the result of cloning or hacking scams that see criminals try [to] add people on the site, and then use that friendship as a way of stealing money from them or running other cons.”
Social media accounts are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Most people these days run 100+ accounts, as figures from password management software apps show. These figures are only increasing over time. Some sites are managing the inevitability of their users shuffling off this mortal coil with features designed to deactivate accounts after months of inactivity or other features, Boyd explained in a recent blog post:
Many sites now offer a way for relatives and executors to memorialise, or just delete, an account. In other circumstances, services would rather you ‘self-manage’ and plan ahead for your own demise (cheerful!) by setting a ticking timer. If the account is inactive for the specified length of time, then into the great digital ether it goes.
While a lot of services don’t openly advertise what to do in the event of a death on their website, they will give advice should you contact them, whether social network, email service, or web host. When there’s no option available, though, people will forge their own path and take care of their so-called ‘digital estate planning’ themselves.
Users would be ill-advised to leave everything to their next of kin. “Do some pre-handover diligence, and take some time to ensure everything is locked down tight,” Boyd explained. “If there’s anything hugely important you need them to know, tell them in advance.”
People may have bought digital purchases tied to certain platforms. Games on Steam, or music on iTunes or Spotify.
“Legally, when you go, so do your files (in as much as anything you can’t download and keep locally is gone forever),” Boyd explained. “That’s because you’re buying into a licence to use a thing, as opposed to buying the thing itself.”
Here’s a video of his presentation, if you want to see more…
There’s nothing stopping someone from passing on a login to a family member so they can continue to make use of all the purchased content, at least for now. Boyd predicted that at some point, all of our digital accounts tied to financial purchases will have some sort of average human lifespan timer attached to them.
Millennials mark the first generation not to know life before an always-on, everywhere internet, which will become the norm from now on. “Younger generations absolutely will demand reforms to the way we think about digital content, ownership, and inheritance,” Boyd concluded. ®
As well as the inevitable rise and fall of social media site (e.g. MySpace), and web 2.0 services there is also the issue of link rot, the phenomenon of more and more URLs not working over time. This issue is covered by Boyd in another recent blog post here.
A German court ruled you can inherit Facebook content like a letter or a diary
Click here to view original web page at A German court ruled you can inherit Facebook content like a letter or a diary
Germany’s highest court ruled Thursday (July 12) that the parents of a teenager who died in 2012 after being hit by a train should be allowed to access her Facebook account, including her private messages.
The court argued that digital content should be passed onto heirs like letters, books, or diaries. The girl’s parents wanted to look into her account to determine whether she committed suicide. This would also help determine whether the driver of the train should be entitled to compensation.
Over the course of the legal battle, Facebook refused to give parents access to the account to protect the privacy of the people she was connected to on the platform, the BBC reported.
Currently, Facebook’s policy is to “memorialize” an account when the site is informed of someone’s death. If a user has a “legacy contact” (here are instructions on how to set one up), Facebook grants them limited access to the user’s account, allowing them change the user’s profile picture, accept friend requests, or pin posts to the top of the user’s profile. They can also ask the platform to delete the account. Recently, Facebook told Quartz, the company revised its policy to allow parents or guardians of minors to become legacy contacts after their child has died.
In rare cases, the company says, authorized people, like family members, can request information from a deceased person’s account, if they have a court order. But there’s no guarantee they will get what they need.
A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement the company disagreed with the German ruling:
These questions — how to weigh the wishes of the relatives and protect the privacy of third parties – are some of the toughest we’ve confronted. We empathize with the family. At the same time, Facebook accounts are used for a personal exchange between individuals which we have a duty to protect. While we respectfully disagree with today’s decision by [the court], the lengthy process shows how complex the issue under discussion is. We will be analyzing the judgment to assess its full implications.
As more of our lives are online, the question of what happens to our data after we die becomes both more complicated and pressing. The wishes of family members of a person who has passed away often run into the terms of service of Silicon Valley companies that store their data. In the US, the girl’s parents would not be able to obtain her private messages in a similar situation, Gene Newman, editorial director of Everplans, a company that creates digital estate archives, told Quartz.
There’s been a “lot of progress” in the US when it comes to the regulation of digital estates, Newman said, but, “it’s still such a tricky area.” Companies are extra-careful when it comes to granting a third-party access to someone’s account because of potential abuses.
Many US states have in recent years passed regulations which enable fiduciary access to a deceased person’s accounts, but the person has to legally grant the right to their communications to someone trusted before they die.
Today, inheriting digital assets can be quite complicated, but in the future, Newman said, they will likely be treated “as the stuff in your house.”
For now, especially if you don’t live in a state with one of these fiduciary laws, Newman recommends sharing passwords with your loved ones if you want them to be in full control of your accounts when you die—even though this might technically breach some of the tech companies terms of service, which stipulate that only one person should be associated with one account.