Tag: family member

Who Gets Your Data After Death? Accessing and Managing a Deceased Person’s Digital Remnants

Who Gets Your Data After Death? Accessing and Managing a Deceased Person’s Digital Remnants

Eleanore

Who Gets Your Data After Death? Accessing and Managing a Deceased Person’s Digital Remnants

Click here to view original web page at Who Gets Your Data After Death? Accessing and Managing a Deceased Person’s Digital Remnants

When a loved one passes away, dealing with the mundane little things is an unfortunate, and often headache-inducing, necessity. Canceling a deceased loved one’s bills and magazine subscriptions, dealing with their financial situations… And now you have to worry about your loved one’s digital affairs as well. You have to account for everything from their email inboxes to their Facebook account, and the data they left behind. What do you do with it all?

There aren’t many clear or easy ways for people to transfer their digital assets after they’ve passed on. This includes things like their iTunes media library, or even just the credentials needed to access the departed’s various online accounts. Some people have started to wonder if they should include things like passwords to their multitudes of online accounts in their wills.

It can be difficult to successfully petition the likes of Google or Apple to release information on users who have passed away. This is often true regardless of your relation to the deceased. And social media platforms keep a tight leash on their users’ login credentials, even after they’ve passed on.

Accessing Data From a Deceased Loved One’s Electronic Devices

On occasion, we here at Gillware receive calls from people looking to have data retrieved from a phone or tablet belonging to a deceased loved one. Usually all they’re looking for are photos and contacts belonging to the deceased—photos to remember them by, and friends to notify of their passing. Sometimes this data is very difficult to get a hold of outside of a data recovery lab. This is especially true when dealing with mobile devices.

When you die, all of your data stays right where you left it. Making sure your loved ones can access the data you leave behind isn’t something many of us plan for. This can leave your loved ones in a bind when you pass away and they have to deal with your affairs—both analog and digital. The trend in data storage, especially among mobile devices, is encryption and total data security. If you don’t plan ahead, accessing the data you’ve left behind on your phone or synced with your Apple or Google account can prove difficult, or even nigh-impossible, for your loved ones.

Below are some tips for retrieving data from mobile devices and computers after their users have passed on. If you cannot retrieve the data on your own or with help from Apple or Google, though, the experts at Gillware Data Recovery and Gillware Digital Forensics can help. Our data recovery and forensic engineers have often assisted people in retrieving data from phones, computers, and other mobile devices belonging to deceased loved ones. In these situations, the data we recover often helps bring much-needed closure to the deceased person’s grieving family and friends.

Accessing a Deceased Loved One’s iPhone

apple logo

Apple iPhones are, unfortunately, notoriously difficult to access in the event of their owners’ passing. Unlike many Android phone models, iPhones do not have (often unencrypted) microSD cards you can take out of the phone. All of the data resides within the encrypted flash memory chip built into the device. You can’t pick the lock or bust down the door, metaphorically speaking. Either you know the passcode that gives you access to the data on the phone, or you don’t. Your iPhone does not send your passcode directly to some giant password database at Apple HQ. Only the user—and anybody else they may have told—knows their own iPhone passcode.

Apple’s data protection policies, especially their encryption policies, are a harsh mistress. You cannot appeal to an iPhone’s reason or emotion, because it has none. Apple iPhones are designed to be virtually unhackable without taking the most extreme of measures. Each successive model is more unhackable than the last. That’s just the way these things are—and even appealing to Tim Cook can’t change that.

However, while Apple can’t help you access your loved one’s iPhone after they’ve passed on, their Apple ID, iTunes, and iCloud accounts present a much less insurmountable goal. These accounts often hold data that is synchronized between the owner’s iPhone, iPad, and other devices. Access to these accounts is often easier to gain than access to the iPhone itself.

To gain access to a deceased loved one’s Apple ID, iTunes, or iCloud account information, you can contact Apple Support. Apple Support will ask for identifying information, such as a death certificate of the user, and proof of relation. Apple Support does, of course, often err on the side of caution when it comes to releasing information on another user’s account.

Accessing a Deceased Loved One’s Android Mobile Phone

If your deceased loved one owned an Android mobile phone, your options are less limited. Depending on the model of phone and version of the Android operating system, you may have some luck using one of these methods to bypass the passcode or pattern lock.

Many Android mobile phones also store some of the user’s data on a small microSD card inside the phone. You can easily remove the microSD card, place it into an adapter, and plug it into a computer, even if you can’t access the phone it belonged to. Not all mobile phones come with a microSD card preinstalled, however. In addition, how much data the user had on the SD card depends on how the user had their phone set up.

Owners of Android phones often have their phones tied to a Google account. In these cases, some data on the phone, such as contacts or photos, may be synchronized with the user’s Google Drive. Like with Apple, you can contact Google to access your loved one’s account. In the interest of protecting user privacy, Google asks for plenty of identifying information about both you and your loved one before they decide whether to comply with your request.

Requesting access to a deceased person’s Google account
Requesting access to a deceased person’s account on

Some of the information Google requires includes your name, mailing address, email address, the Google account username or Gmail address of your loved one, their death certificate, and an example of an email conversation between you and the deceased.

Requesting data from a loved one’s Google account is a two-part system. Google will review your request and may request a court order before moving onto the second step.

Accessing a Deceased Loved One’s Home Computer

Unlike with mobile phones, getting into your loved one’s computer to recover the files and documents they left behind proves much less of a challenge. Even if you don’t know the password to their user account, accessing the data on a computer is downright trivial. You can access their files from another account on the PC. Or, if you don’t have one, you can remove the hard drive from the PC and view the data on it on another computer using a hard disk drive enclosure or USB adapter cable. These methods all work, unless the data on the drive has been encrypted. When you encrypt data, it is impossible to make sense of it without the proper password to unlock the data (of course, if encryption were easy to circumvent, there wouldn’t be much point in having it).

This covers most of the data a deceased loved one will have lying on their physical devices once they pass on. But what about everything they’ve left behind on the Internet? What happens to it? Can you get to it?

What Happens to Your Social Media Accounts After Death?

The people using social media to stay abreast of current events, share things that are happening in their lives, and keep in touch with their families and friends number in the billions. Between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and various other platforms, people are accruing social media presences at an accelerating rate. When a user stops using an account, it just stays there. After all, your social media account won’t know when you’re dead. It can be unsettling, to say the least, to know that a family member or friend’s social media accounts are floating around through cyberspace as if nothing has changed.

All social media platforms highly value the privacy of their users, even their deceased users. As seen above with Google and Apple, the platforms holding onto your data, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., are reticent to release it to just anybody. (And in this case, family and friends count as “just anybody”.)

In general, social media platforms have no interest in providing other people with the proverbial keys to the kingdom, even after a user has passed on. However, social media platforms do have protocol in place regarding deceased users and what can be done to their accounts. Their protocol tends to be stringent, as many platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have fallen victim to celebrity death hoaxes in the past.

Some social media platforms have policies in place allowing people who were close to a deceased user to make limited decisions about what happens to their account after they have passed on. These include things like Facebook and Instagram’s memorial accounts. For the most part, though, social media platforms simply lock or deactivate the deceased user’s account.

Setting Up a Facebook Memorial Account

Facebook’s policy regarding deceased users allows for deceased users’ accounts to be transformed into “memorial accounts.” The deceased user is not treated as an “active” user and does not appear on potential friends lists for other users and other public spaces, although anything the user shared remains in place. Friends and family of the deceased user can post on the wall of the deceased and share memories of them.

Nobody can log into the deceased user’s account or alter any information on their account. However, if the user had defined a legacy contact prior to their passing, the legacy contact is allowed limited access to moderate the memorial account, and can request to download a copy of the account. However, they will not have access to the user’s private messages or be able to add or remove friends.

Only the user themselves can designate a legacy contact. In your Facebook account settings, you can choose a legacy contact, arrange to have your account memorialized after your death, or request to have your account deleted after you pass on.

A verified immediate family member on Facebook can request to have their departed loved one’s account memorialized or permanently deleted by contacting Facebook Support.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has a similar policy, with memorial accounts of its own for deceased users. However, unlike Facebook, users cannot arrange to have their account memorialized before they pass on. Instead, a relative of the deceased user must contact Instagram and provide a copy of the user’s death certificate.

Deactivating a Deceased User’s Twitter Account

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has no options for “memorializing” deceased users’ accounts. But like Facebook, Twitter refuses to share login credentials for a deceased user’s account, so nobody can post on their behalf or read through their direct messages. Twitter will deactivate the account, which puts it in a queue for permanent deletion.

If you have login credentials to the deceased user’s account, you can simply deactivate their account just as easily as you would your own. If you do not know their credentials, though, you must go through Twitter Support. To request the deactivation of a deceased user’s account, you must fill out Twitter Support’s Privacy Form. To prevent abuse of this feature, Twitter requires you to provide information about yourself and the user. This includes a copy of their ID and your ID, and may include a Power of Attorney authorizing you to act on their behalf. If you meet these criteria, Twitter will honor your request to deactivate the deceased user’s account.

Removing LinkedIn Profiles for Deceased Users

Like any online account, nothing automatically happens to your LinkedIn account when you die. This can make it distressing for your loved ones, coworkers, or classmates if, after your death, LinkedIn serves up your profile to them in a “People You Might Want to Link To” email.

LinkedIn Help requires a friend or relative of the deceased to go through a rather involved process to close a LinkedIn profile for a deceased user. LinkedIn allows anybody to submit the form to remove the profile of a user who has passed on. However, since LinkedIn asks for you to state your relationship to the deceased, they will likely deny any request made by someone who is not close to the deceased.

Deactivating a Deceased Google User’s Account

You can request to have a deceased loved one’s Google account, including their Google+ page, Google Drive, Gmail inbox, and YouTube account, deleted by contacting Google Support. You will have to go through many of the same steps as you would when trying to access data stored on a loved one’s Google account as we discussed earlier. Google is more likely to honor a request to simply deactivate a deceased user’s account altogether than to release data from or provide access to the account. Understandably, deactivating a deceased user’s account is less of a breach of privacy than sharing their data.

Planning for the Future: Keeping Your Data Manageable and Accessible After Death

Image source:

Losing a loved one is painful enough. We wish that dealing with the myriad things left behind in their absence were easier. Almost nobody likes thinking about mortality. Even fewer people relish the thought of dealing with everything their deceased loved one left behind.

Throw in our swiftly-accumulating social media accounts in the mix and things get uglier. Your grieving loved ones quickly become inundated with a flood of tiring and frustrating work as they find and deactivate the roughly half-dozen accounts the average person has today.

You can ensure that dealing with your digital affairs when you pass on doesn’t put your loved ones through unnecessary layers of bureaucracy by creating a digital estate plan.

Estate planning is an important part of making sure everything goes smoothly after you’ve shed your mortal coil. Estate planning includes writing up a Last Will and Testament, financial or health care Power of Attorney, and other documents. In the modern age, what to do with all your digital remains has to be taken into consideration as well.

A digital estate plan is, as its name suggests, a plan for your digital estate—the online data and digital documentation and belongings you’ve accumulated over the years. Your digital estate encompasses everything from digital financial records to your online accounts. Keeping your digital accounts accessible after death is part of having a good digital estate plan.

Creating a Digital Estate Plan

A digital estate plan will help your family deal with whatever you leave behind when you pass on. This includes accessing and appropriately managing your online accounts, determining whether any of your digital property has any financial value that needs to be reported, and distributing and transferring any digital assets. A digital estate plan can even keep you and your family safe from “ghosting”, or identity theft of deceased persons.

Planning your digital estate involves tallying up all of your digital records and online accounts. This includes all of your data storage hardware in addition to your online accounts. Once you’ve made a list of your digital assets, you decide what should be done with each, just as you would with your physical assets.

Some people recommend creating a separate “digital will” for your digital assets. In your will, you can appoint a digital executor. A digital executor will manage your digital estate, just like an executor manages your physical estate.

However, while Wisconsin has laws in place regarding “digital asset custodians”, not all states have legislation regarding digital estate planning. And as a result, your digital executor may not be legally recognized. Despite the legal limbo, though, appointing a digital executor can still make dealing with your estate much easier. A digital estate plan is still of great use, even if you cannot formalize it in a legally binding document.

Using Password Management Tools to Manage Your Digital Estate

We here at Gillware recommend that you store your passwords in a safe, secure place. Common choices are a locked file cabinet or a safe or safety deposit box. Only your trusted loved ones should be able to access it in the event of your death. The easiest and most convenient way to do this is with a password manager, such as KeePass.

With KeePass, you can store a digital record of all your online and device passwords in a database file. This includes anything from email, social media accounts, and streaming and data storage accounts to your smartphone’s passcode. With your password credentials in hand, your loved ones can easily deal with the digital cruft that built up over the course of your life.

Of course, this allows your loved ones to see all of the data on your accounts. You may want to exercise prudence in what login credentials you make available to your heirs.

There are many options for you to choose from to make your password database file accessible only to the right people. To make sure your loved ones can get to the file itself, leave the database on a flash drive or burn it to a CD. The next step is ensuring that only the right people have the master password to unlock the database.

Whatever you do, proactively planning your digital estate can make things much easier on your loved ones once you’ve moved on.

Keep in mind that we here at Gillware are data recovery and IT experts, not probate law experts. To plan your digital estate, discuss the matter with your estate lawyer, just as you would to plan your physical estate.

Hard Questions: What Should Happen to People’s Online Identity When They Die?

Hard Questions: What Should Happen to People’s Online Identity When They Die?

Eleanore

Hard Questions: What Should Happen to People’s Online Identity When They Die?

Click here to view original web page at Hard Questions: What Should Happen to People’s Online Identity When They Die?

By Monika Bickert, Director of Global Policy Management

In the days after my husband died, I kept sending him text messages. His cell phone lay uncharged on my nightstand, just a few feet away from me, and I knew no one would ever read the words I wrote, but I kept writing anyway. I needed to feel like I was still connected to him. As I sat in bed texting, I knew that my phone also held recent photos of Phil smiling with our daughters and a video of him laughing with his brother just two days before I took him to the hospital, but I didn’t look at those. It would have hurt too much. Instead, I just kept writing to him, pretending he was on the other side of the messages I was sending and would soon write back.

When we lose someone we love, we often feel a desperate need to connect to them in whatever way we can. In moments like that, our phones, the internet and social media can sometimes be a refuge. We can talk to our loved ones, as I did, or when we’re ready to face the memories, we can lose ourselves in old emails, photos, videos and posts. With an ease that wasn’t possible 20 years ago, we can now hear and see our loved ones after they are gone, and we can share those memories with others who are grieving.

But other times, the online world can make loss even more painful. The reminders of our loved ones are everywhere, and with each reminder a renewed realization of their death. For months after Phil died, I’d cry when I’d receive an Amazon email prompting him to order his regular shipment of secondhand detective novels, or a message from his pharmacy cheerfully reminding him that his chemotherapy was ready for pickup. Even now, I pause whenever I log into Facebook and see a post of mine resurfaced from years ago. I worry it will be one of the many I shared with friends over the course of Phil’s battle with cancer, detailing his progress and hinting at our naïve faith that he would continue to beat the odds.

Depending on the circumstances of a person’s death, those online reminders can be overwhelming. A mother who loses her daughter to domestic violence may feel sick when she looks online and sees photos of her daughter’s wedding day. A university student who receives a birthday reminder for a roommate who died by suicide might feel grief more acutely thinking of all the expressions of love and support his roommate would be receiving if he were around.

Our Approach at Facebook

When people come to Facebook after suffering a loss, we want them to feel comfort, not pain, which is why we stop sending birthday reminders once we know someone has passed away, and why we try to make it easy for surviving family members to reach us.

All too often, however, it’s difficult for us to know what action to take with the account of someone who has died. What should we do with an account of a deceased young woman, for instance, when one of her parents wants to delete the account but the other wants to preserve it as a memorial for friends and family? How do we know what the daughter would have wanted? And what should we do if they want to see the private messages between the daughter and her friends – friends who are still alive and don’t want their messages to become public?

These questions — how to weigh survivors’ competing interests, determine the wishes of the deceased, and protect the privacy of third parties – have been some of the toughest we’ve confronted, and we still don’t have all the answers. Laws may provide clarity, but often they do not. In many countries, the legal framework for transferring assets to surviving family members does not account for digital assets like social media or email accounts. We are, however, doing our part to try and make these situations easier for everyone.

Respect the Wishes of the Deceased

Where the law permits, we try to respect the wishes of those who have passed away. Sometimes, however, we simply don’t know what the person would have wanted. If a bereaved spouse asks us to add her as a friend to her late husband’s profile so she can see his photos and posts, how do we know if that’s what her husband would have wanted? Is there a reason they were not previously Facebook friends? Does it mean something if she had sent him a friend request when he was alive and he had rejected it? What if the wife had simply never been on Facebook until after her husband’s death?

If we don’t know what the deceased person would have wanted, we try to leave the account exactly as that person left it. When we learn that someone has passed away, our standard process is to add “Remembering” above the name on the person’s profile, to make clear that the account is now a memorial site, and to stop any new attempts to log into the account. Once we’ve memorialized an account, anything on the profile remains on Facebook and is visible to the people who could already see it before the profile was memorialized. We don’t remove or change anything. This is our way of respecting the choices someone made while alive.

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. You can give your legacy contact permission to download an archive of the photos, posts and profile information you shared on Facebook, but they won’t be able to log in as you or see your private messages. Find out more about legacy contacts and how to add one to your account in our Help Center.

Protect the Privacy of Survivors

Even where the laws are clear and the intent of the deceased person is clear, we sometimes have other interests to consider. For instance, if a father loses a teenaged son to suicide, the father might want to read the private messages of his son to understand what was happening in his son’s life. Had he been struggling in his university classes? Was he having problems with his boyfriend? As natural as it might seem to provide those messages to the father, we also have to consider that the people who exchanged messages with the son likely expected those messages would remain private.

Although cases like this are heartbreaking, we generally can’t turn over private messages on Facebook without affecting other people’s privacy. In a private conversation between two people, we assume that both people intended the messages to remain private. And even where it feels right to turn over private messages to family members, laws may prevent us from doing so. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Stored Communications Act, for instance, prevent us from relying upon family consent to disclose the contents of a person’s communications.

We’re Still Learning

Despite our efforts to respect the wishes of those who pass away and those who survive them, we still encounter difficult situations where we end up disappointing people.

And even when we know perfectly and can act consistently with the wishes of the deceased and their loved ones, we know our actions will be of limited comfort. As I’m learning from my own experience, grief doesn’t recede quickly or quietly. Nearly a year after Phil died, I still catch my breath when I look through old photos on my phone. Some of those photos, like the ones I took of Phil in the hospital when I mistakenly thought we’d be going home the next day, move me to tears.

But others, like the one of him standing proudly in our backyard with our daughters on Father’s Day, are starting to make me smile again. Those flashes of happiness, however brief, prove to me that reminders of our loved ones don’t have to be reminders of loss. And that, in turn, gives me hope that social media and the rest of our online world, rather than provoking pain, can ultimately ease our grief.

The Evolution of The Self

The Evolution of The Self

Eleanore

The Evolution of The Self

Click here to view original web page at The Evolution of The Self

Written by Markus Iofcea & Oleksiy Novak, UBS Y Think Tank

Leaving behind a legacy is a fundamental part of human identity. But how will sophisticated online data and revolutions in AI impact material, biological and ideological legacy?

Nature and the environment used to be the main driving forces of biological evolution. At a certain point in time, humanity disrupted this equilibrium. Instead of having to adapt to the environment, our ancestors built tools that enabled our species to circumvent the need to evolve.[1] Centuries of cooperative efforts and tool building introduced the possibilities of space travel, wireless communications, instantaneous information exchange and an exponentially-growing technological frontier. Today, technologies like Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things allow us to track, aggregate and analyse more data about ourselves than ever before. Services like Spotify, Facebook, Amazon already know more about our personal preferences than our closest friends. Based on the accumulated data, these and other ecosystems are building online versions of your identity, or simply put, your Digital Self. For the time being the Digital Self is only a distorted representation of the true self. However, as the world is becoming more interconnected, the number of data points that are able to capture even the most complex elements of the inner identity (emotions, feelings, thoughts) are becoming feasible.[2] It will soon be possible to create, combine and connect high resolution copies of a person’s multiple identities and upload it to a digital archive, essentially constructing a dematerialised version of you, a digital you. When combined with general artificial intelligence, the Digital Self can become more than an aggregation of identities, it can become a self-conscious entity with important implications on society, and in particular on the foundations of human legacy.Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina

Leaving behind a legacy is a fundamental characteristic of humans. For some, creating a long lasting legacy can even become the purpose of life itself. Human ability to perceive time means that not only do we live in the present moment, but can also recall the past as well as create a vision for the future. The sense of time motivates individuals to leave behind a resonating echo of oneself in the hopes of being remembered even when the physical presence fades into the past. This resonating echo is preserved in the form of the legacy humans leave behind. Legacy can be decomposed into three categories: material legacy, biological legacy and ideological legacy.[3] With recent technological developments, all three constituents are approaching a revolutionary transformation. More specifically, the emergence of the Digital Self will have profound consequences on inheritance, evolution, and ideological foundations of a future society.

Your future grandchildren will inherit a digital version of you

While older generations are still holding on to their physical libraries of music, books, movies and pictures, the same cannot be said for those who were born in the last decade. Today’s youth is born digital and is capable of living in a world that is heavily reliant on technology. The trend towards digitisation will continue with new generations having fewer attachments to physical object. Already today, many individuals are moving towards a growing invisible library of documents, pictures, songs and soon a million other data points. We are all storing a perpetual timeline of information that ranges from the least significant preferences to the most important life moments. As a consequence of such transformations, material legacy will most likely be redefined and become more than just a means of passing on physical objects to new generations. There are drawbacks to the current ways of passing on inheritance across individuals. For instance, physical objects are limited in their use by multiple individuals, meaning that only one person usually receives the inheritance of an item. Physical heirlooms are prone to degradation and can lack emotional connection between the deceased and the recipient. What if a person’s legacy could become something much more meaningful, inspiring, and eternal than a physical object? As underlined previously, human possessions are shifting online, and the presence of digital artifacts is increasing in day-to-day interactions.[4] Our online identities are encompassing all of the digital memories we are creating throughout our lives. These identities contain traces of individualism; that is something that is hardly captured in physical items.

For this reason the Digital Self, the aggregation of all identities of an individual, is becoming the new meta of human inheritance.

Instead of leaving behind a physical object, humans will one day inherit the Digital Selves of family members, friends and acquaintances. Digital selves will serve the purpose of continuing the interactions between the living and the deceased. Human will be able to communicate with the deceased, relive memorable moments spent together, ask questions and even seek advice. Death will most likely transform into a concept involving a gradual shift of states instead of an abrupt end of connection. This continuous interaction could have the potential to alleviate humans of the psychological trauma related to death. But it could also manifest itself into an everlasting yearning for the past. What is clear however is that disputes over who gets to inherit the family heirlooms will diminish. Everyone can have access to the Digital Selves of the deceased due to their ability to be replicated.Will legacy live on in material objects? Photo credit Dakota Corbin

Imagine a human raised entirely by an A.I. Would he think the same as us?

Up until recently other humans were responsible for the transfer of ideologies to newer generations. Most commonly, individuals built their foundation of thought either through first hand (role models, teachers, parents) or second hand (books, scientific journals, folklore) knowledge transfer. Today’s technological expansion is shifting the balance of how knowledge is passed down generations. More frequently humans learn through interactions with information appliances rather than other human beings. These information appliances enhanced with the power of Artificial Intelligence can make the process of knowledge transfer automated and tailored to each individual’s learning capacity. It is possible to imagine a future in which the Digital Self takes on the role of becoming the teacher since it already knows about the particularities of each individual. Ideological legacy will soon be in the hands of the AI, which in turn can have important consequences for the further development of the ideologies themselves.

The learning process will become more tailored and specialised to an individual’s interests. When the Digital Self knows which are the best parameters to use to enhance a person’s learning experience, the method of knowledge transfer as well as the type of content will likely become more fragmented. A person would not need to rely exclusively on one Digital Self to pass on the information. People who have been recognised for their great achievements over their lifetime could be persuaded to “donate” their Digital Self to humanity. All the knowledge base, character traits that were accumulated by our ancestors, would be available for others to interact with and learn from. Imagine living through life with your childhood idols by your side, allowing you to build truly personal connections with digital mentors.

This would have a profound impact on generations to come, because they would have unlimited opportunities to embrace, study and apply the characteristics of great human beings.

Instead of focusing on the ‘capture all approach’ current education systems are relying on, future generations could start pursuing what really interests them. Although external factors, such as other individuals, will continue to have a strong effect on what new generations learn in their cognitive development, over a long enough period of technological influence it is possible to imagine a society that is connected by a single set of principles that have been passed across generations.Who will be the teachers in tomorrow’s world? Photo credit Cristian Newman

The descendant of the homo sapiens will exist online

Humans have become the sculptors of their own environment. We are actively involved in creating, modifying, altering and building new paradigms of life. Evolution is becoming increasingly a technological phenomenon and less a biological one. One such example is the extension of human senses beyond their natural abilities. Bio-hacking pioneers like Tim Cannon are using magnets embedded beneath the skin to allow individuals to detect nearby electromagnetic fields.[5] This is just one example among many that merge biological sensory systems with technology. Humans are literally extending their perception of the physical reality with existing senses and are becoming a hybrid of biological and digital systems.

We have already seen how our existing bodies are being modified to become increasingly efficient at what we already are designed to do, but the fact remains that human genes are keeping society on a leash. As much as we continue hacking our bodies with technological innovations, humans are still designed based on biological foundations. And despite all the progress society has achieved in the last centuries, basic natural instincts are still dictating the paths of our lives. Instead of making evolutionary steps how can we achieve an evolutionary jump? If one were to design a completely new being using current and potential future technologies, what would that being look like?Future Technology & Human Optimisation, VICE Media

The data we are continuously contributing to build higher resolution versions of the Digital Self serves as the foundation for this jump in the evolution of the homo sapiens. Prior to digitisation, extended identity was something that could only be perceived implicitly through a collection of physical objects a person chose to own.[6] Today, extended identity has become more explicit and dynamic since it can actually be visualised within online activity. Identities have become themselves digital objects, that can be copied, upgraded or deleted. This online identity re-construction, combined with artificial intelligence has the potential to create a new form of being, a digital being. A digital being is not simply another form of general artificial intelligence, it is much more than that. Since these beings will be based upon the identities of humans, they will inherit our individuality. A collection of such digital beings, all created from the unique identities of humans, would combine to form a new type of society.

These digital beings would not be creatures of the flesh, meaning that they would have many interesting properties that go beyond the biological constraints of the homo sapiens.

Unlike humans, these entities would not be weighed down by age, they would be able to live indefinitely. The digital property to self-replicate would allow these beings to infinitely venture into different pursuits of life where each copy would take on a different journey. They could create simulated worlds of their own in which they would experiment with possibilities of the universe. Travelling distances would only be limited by the fundamental physical properties, meaning that these descendants of the humans would most likely become an intergalactic species. A society of such beings would exist in multiple shapes, each individual could exist as a single entity, or due to their digital nature they could combine into a single living organism that has the properties of multiple individuals as well.

The upcoming technological evolution will not exist in absolute terms. Most likely our species will expand into different directions. Like a spectrum, there will be a range of possible alternatives from humans that continue existing in their original biological form, all the way to completely digital beings. What is interesting is that evolution will become something that is chosen and not created by chance. Only time will tell how these transformations will be perceived in the future. What is yet to be seen in light of these technological shifts is whether qualities that make us genuinely human (irrationality, emotions, egocentrism) will disappear with time, or on contrary, become even more pronounced and accepted in the future. Will humans become even more human, or will they blend with the machines and converge towards a path of singularity?

Footnotes

[1] Harari, Yuval N. Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. New York, NY: Harper, 2015.

[2] Miessler, Daniel. “The Real Internet of Things.” danielmiessler.com, 2015.

[3] Rebecca Gulotta, William Odom, Jodi Forlizzi, Haakon Faste. Digital Artifacts as Legacy: Exploring the Lifespan and Value of Digital Data

[4] William Odom, Richard Banks, Richard Harper, David Kirk, Sian Lindley, Abigail Sellen. Technology Heirlooms? Considerations for Passing Down and Inheriting Digital Materials.

[6] Russell W. Belk. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” J Consum Res; 15 (2): 139-168, 1988.

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People are going to court over dead family members’ Facebook pages – it’s time for post-mortem privacy

People are going to court over dead family members’ Facebook pages – it’s time for post-mortem privacy

Eleanore

People are going to court over dead family members’ Facebook pages – it’s time for post-mortem privacy

Click here to view original web page at People are going to court over dead family members’ Facebook pages – it’s time for post-mortem privacy

The grieving parents of a dead teenager in Germany were recently denied access to their daughter’s Facebook account. They wanted to read the profile page to see if she was being bullied, but the social network argued that doing so would compromise the privacy of her contacts – and a judge agreed. None of this, however, takes into account what the girl would have wanted.

As you share more of your personal information, communications and photographs online, there is a growing risk that one day your sentimental keepsakes could be locked up for ever. Or, on the other hand, that your family, friends or heirs may gain unwanted access to intimate records. It’s time for the law to offer the same protection to our online property as it does to our physical possessions.

In most countries’ legal systems, individuals have the right to decide what happens to their wealth and assets when they die. This is the long-established principle of testamentary freedom – that is, freedom to make a will and bequeath your assets to (arguably) whomever you wish. This principle is underpinned by Western ideas of autonomy and free will, established in works of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham.

In my research, I argue that this same autonomy and freedom should extend online and enable individuals to decide what happens to their online “wealth” (mainly their personal data) when they die. Only 38% of people surveyed in England and Wales in 2015 had a will, meaning most people hadn’t made legal provisions for their deaths. Yet we still think the law should offer this protection. So even if most people don’t care about protecting their online data after they die, in principle there should still be a way for someone to do so.

My colleague Prof Lilian Edwards and I believe there should be a mechanism to address this inconsistency that we would call post-mortem privacy. This refers to the right of a person to preserve and control what becomes of his or her reputation, dignity, integrity, secrets or memory after death.

Current protection

At the moment, this kind of protection varies around the world and, in most jurisdictions’ succession laws, families have a default access to a deceased person’s memories and data. Service providers already permit some of this, too. For instance, this means that families can ask for Facebook accounts to be deleted or for access to some of the content (but not private chats). They can also request the profile be turned into a memorial.

Would you want your parents to see all your messages?

But users might not want their families to have these powers and instead might want control over the very sensitive personal content found on some social media profiles and the digital identity that goes with it. The legal recognition of post-mortem privacy would enable users to decide what happens to their data after death. They could request full or partial deletion, transfer of some of their data to friends or family, or some other option.

This concept has so far received little attention in law – especially in common-law systems, such as in England, where legal decisions depend partly on previous judgments. Common-law system have historically been much less inclined to protect personalty and privacy rights than civil law systems. This is particularly true for the post-mortem protection of one’s personality. In fact, the UK law expressly excludes this protection. But there have also been some very exciting recent changes in the US and France.

Legal models

The model law adopted by several states in the US suggests that the user should have a right to choose what happens to their data and assets on death. If people express this wish using technology, for example with something like Google’s Inactive Account Manager tool, then that should override even provisions of their will.

A similar solution has recently been adopted in France in the Digital Republic Act 2016. This would mean that, for the first time in Europe, the law could recognise the use of software tools for the post-mortem transmission of digital assets, such as Google Inactive Account Manager or Facebook Legacy Contact, similar to the American legislation mentioned above.

These tools within the services where we store our data allow users to choose whether they want their accounts entirely deleted after they die or to leave some of their data to chosen beneficiaries (typically their friends or family). Although these tools have been available for a few years with, anecdotally, relatively little uptake, the fact they have been adopted by some of the world’s biggest service providers suggests post-mortem privacy is not seen as obscure, creepy or impossible anymore. There are already some practical and legal mechanisms to recognise and enforce it.

But to further clarify this legally and ensure more people have access to this kind of service, post-mortem privacy should be recognised in other countries’ data protection laws where personal data isn’t currently protected after death, for instance in the EU. Without it, we can expect to see many more battles over our online heirlooms.