Ethics and the Commercialization of the Digital Graveyard
Who will be in charge of your online legacy after you die?
Everyone knows somebody who passed away. As bittersweet as it is their Facebook profiles are mostly still online reminding us about them as living people. Unless you want to stroll down and find an obituary, you will never know that they are deceased. All posts after the obituary are from their living family members, friends, and colleagues. Those posts hide the fact of their death. Nowadays, Facebook is turning into the digital graveyard of dead people's data. According to some estimates dated 2019, Carl Ohman and David Watson have estimated 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100. As of 2019, it was also estimated over 30 million accounts were still active; whose owners have died. And the number is growing daily. It means that at some point in time the number of dead accounts will surpass the number of living accounts. Unless the family members memorialize the account, the account stays active and populates everyone’s Facebook feed. It means that people stay alive in the digital world indefinitely, unless the company that owns the account changes it's policy.
Facebook is not the only company that is turning into the digital graveyard and rich mine of deceased personal data available for everyone’s use. Think about Apple, Google, YouTube, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, WhatsApp. They all hold huge amounts of personal data of people who are no longer with us. The newest market to take on this industry by storm are companies that use AI bots to create digital "active" versions from the deceased. Imagine talking to your long lost cousin, Albert Einstein while sipping your coffee over breakfast. The bot will have his voice, his words, his intonations, mannerisms just as if he were alive today.
Companies such as HereAfter AI, Story File, You, Only Virtual, and even Amazon Alexa use all the information we provide willingly or unwillingly and the information they collect from the Internet to create a chatbot. Chatbot or avatars can communicate to you, ask and answer questions, tell stories, read books, and even look like your dead loved one. Pretty scary, right? Not all of that is bad. For some people talking to a dead family member through the avatar brings a certain amount of comfort. Other people love to be in the spotlight and they do not mind that after death their life stories will be out there for everyone to see for eternity. Nevertheless, it is a two-edged sword. People cannot guarantee that the person creating the chatbot or avatar will be doing so in their best interest. After all, the truth and the beauty are in the eyes of the beholder. Anyone can design a chatbot that represents someone’s character completely differently and there is not much we can do to combat it post-mortem. Currently, there is no universal law in the US but rather a medley of federal and state laws that somewhat protect the privacy of personal data. Moreover, personal data is hard to protect under the law after death which presents a huge risk for defamation, identity theft, and scams.
Here comes the question: who owns your personal digital data after you die?
Right now, big companies according to their privacy policy, terms and conditions own the data you generate throughout your life unless you address it before your death. Every time you go to the website, privacy policy, terms and conditions are at the bottom of the website in a small font. Nobody reads them. Furthermore, Lorrie Faith Cranor and Aleecia McDonald at Carnegie Mellon determined that it would take seventy-six workdays a year for the average user to read all privacy policies they encounter in one year. Think about it, seventy-six workdays a year. The average user barely has a couple of minutes to look at the website content, much less to read its privacy policy. Our lack of knowledge, time, and involvement allows big companies to use our data to their advantage. If you do not want your data to float on the Internet for eternity and your dependents to watch you talking or performing acts you never would have approved of, it is time to take control of your digital legacy.
This month Dexit's blog will focus on the ethics and commercialization of the Digital Graveyard. Please follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook for our next article. We will have a special guest interview, Dr. Carl Ohman from the Uppsala University in Sweden next week with incredible foresight and insight, please be sure to join us.
