Shawn Wen of Bloomberg reports on Swedish academic Carl Öhman’s argument that tech companies have no incentive to be responsible caretakers of our posthumous digital footprint. Wen writes:
In 2012 a 15-year-old girl died in Berlin after being hit by a subway train. Her bereaved parents asked Facebook to turn over her private messages in hopes of understanding whether her death was a suicide or an accident.
Facebook refused. Her death had already been reported to the social media site, which then converted her profile to a “memorialized account.” According to the company’s policy at the time, no one could access memorialized accounts, even with a password. After years of lawsuits and appeals, Germany’s highest court in 2018 ordered Facebook to turn over the profile. […]
“We are the new Natufians,” Öhman writes. I take this to mean that we are entering an era where we will be surrounded by the digital remains of our friends and family whether we like it or not.
It suggests that we are in the nascent stages of reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: The people we love will die, but their data will continue to live indefinitely, digital ghosts in the cloud. At the moment, there’s nothing stopping the Metas and Googles of the world from exploiting them—or perhaps worse, erasing them permanently.
Read more here.
