Technology has drastically changed the way we plan for and deal with death. You can see this in the way people who know they are dying use social media. You can see it in the medical technologies that have kept us alive for longer than our ancestors would have thought possible. You can see it in the changes to the average cost of funerals. You can even see it in legal technology startups that have made it possible to create a will without going to a lawyer. 

One drastically underreported part of how technology has changed death is a concept called digital death. The concept is simple: when we die, there’s no guarantee that our digital presence dies with us. That’s something that has to be planned for; access to the accounts of the deceased largely exists at the whims of digital gatekeepers. We’re going to go over what you can do to plan for digital death and what platforms will allow you to do so when a loved one has passed away.

Planning for Digital Death

Talking about death can be difficult. Pre-planning your funeral can be even more challenging. When you choose your own cemetery plot, and you start writing your will, your mortality is put in stark relief. There are so many advantages to planning for death; it’s inevitable, after all, and doing so can take a lot of stress off of your family, as grueling an experience as it might be for you. The benefits of whole communities having these conversations are incredible; an NPR podcast, “The Town Where Everyone Talks About Death”, goes over how advance directives can save mountains of grief.

Your digital death should be an important consideration when you’re planning for death. In the end, you want final say about how your accounts are treated - whether they’re deleted, treated as memorials, or modified in some other way. The easiest way to do this is to write instructions about how you want your accounts treated in your will. To give access to your accounts, you’ll need to write down your usernames and passwords and then give them to a trusted third party to be opened at the time of your death by whoever you want to carry out your final digital wishes. Be sure to include social media accounts as well as financial accounts.

One element of digital death that’s often ignored is the valuable resources that gamers may have. People who spend a lot of time playing MMORPGs might have in-game currency or status that can be leveraged for real world gains. What’s more, the people in these games can be close friends; digital relationships can be as strong as physical ones. Be sure you have a plan to transition gaming accounts to a trusted loved one.

In order to create a plan for digital death, you’ll need to talk to your loved ones. That can be a difficult thing to do; planning for your own death is difficult enough. Bringing it up with people you care about can lead to some heart-wrenching conversations.  You can use this guide on how to talk to your loved one about funeral pre-planning if you’re looking for a place to start.

How Big Gatekeepers Handle Digital Death

In this section, we’re going to focus on some of the biggest players in the game: Facebook, Google, Instagram (which is owned by Facebook), and Twitter. All of these services will allow you to modify account information and delete accounts if you have access to usernames and passwords. When you don’t, there are some alternate routes you can take.

Google has a service called Inactive Account Manager. This service allows users to decide what happens to their account when it’s remained inactive for a long period of time.They can opt to have their accounts deleted and they can opt to have some or all the data from their account transferred to a trusted third party. You can also request a deceased’s users account be deleted, including the data from their account or funds from their account.

Facebook has a few options for the accounts of the deceased. During your pre-planning, you can create a Legacy Contact. This contact will be able to manage your Facebook account when you pass away. They can allow tribute posts, pin posts, and view posts that you had set to “Only Me”. Even when a person has not set up a Legacy Contact, you can still ask Facebook to remove or memorialize their account once they’ve passed away. Memorialized accounts have a number of unique features - they can’t be logged into, they won’t send birthday reminders, and people can post tributes to the person who is being memorialized.

Instagram, being owned by Facebook, operates in pretty much the same way. The only difference is the absence of a Legacy Contact; you can otherwise request removal and memorialization through the same means. 

Twitter has its own set of rules regarding the accounts of deceased users. As of the writing of this article, the only way to manage the account of someone who has passed away is to send a request to delete it. They’ve stated that they plan on creating a way to memorialize accounts, but nothing has come of that yet; the last news about it was near the end of November, 2019. 

One thing that’s important to remember is that you’re probably reading this article in 2020 (or thereabouts). No one knows what the social media landscape will look like in 40 years; it could have changed drastically in that time. Fortunately, most social media sites have methods of memorializing or removing accounts so check each site’s policies. The ever-shifting landscape is another reason it’s important to leave usernames and passwords so loved ones can access your accounts; that way, no matter what their policies are, you shouldn’t have too many problems.

Though it’s strange to think about, there’s a world where our digital presences will outlast our very tombstones. A world where, in hundreds of years from now, archivists will be able to learn our thoughts on current affairs, will be able to see what we’ve loved, what we’ve lost, and how we lived. Taking the time to make sure this digital tombstone is well-preserved is essential, and it will be interesting to see how managing digital death will change as time goes on.