My 25-year-old friend K. appointed a friend of hers as the heiress of her Facebook account. To the logical question why she thought so early about what would happen to her account on the popular social network after her death, K. replies that the first time such an idea occurred to her was a few years ago. Then, in a short period of time, several of her peers died - classmates and childhood friends. Last year, a loved one of the older generation, whose life was not in any way connected with communication on the Internet, did not become. And in order to invite friends and former colleagues of the deceased to the funeral, K. had to search and restore the phone numbers of strangers from old notebooks. At that moment, she again thought that a person is sometimes suddenly mortal.
Every year, tens of millions of users appear on the Internet, they all register on social networks and leave terabytes of information there, and the virtual platforms themselves and the content stored on them have long acquired material value. Nevertheless, in fact, none of the services has a clear policy for identifying accounts of deceased people and working with such accounts.
What can be done with a deceased person's account
Today, most social networks offer either to "mothball" the account of the deceased, or to delete it.
Thus, the VKontakte press service claims that it always listens to the wishes of the relatives of the deceased: “One of the options for solving this issue is to increase the privacy of the page, when all the content posted on it becomes available only to friends, and the account is kept in that form, which he had at the time of the last visit to the site of its owner."
At the same time, it will not be possible to leave a public post on the page, send an invitation to friends from such a profile, comment on a photo or post on the wall - the account will exist with the content that the user himself added to it during his lifetime. It is also impossible to get access (login and password) to the memorial page - it is only allowed to observe the virtual existence of the deceased after death from the outside. Finally, you can completely delete the page, but in any case, you will have to contact support.
On Facebook, an heir (the so-called legacy contact) can be assigned during his lifetime. When the user dies, his authorized representative will have to send a special request to the support service of the social network. After it is confirmed, a special note (Remembering) will appear in the deceased's profile in front of the name, and the heir will be able to add an attached post to the page (for example, with an obituary or information about the date and place of farewell to the person), respond to new requests to add friends, change the userpic etc. At the same time, you will not be able to make changes to past entries, delete old photos or someone from your friends, or gain access to the personal correspondence of the deceased.
A similar option is available on Instagram, but Twitter has not yet formulated a clear position in relation to deceased users.
How else you can extend your digital life
Sites built on the Digital Beyond platform offer radical ways to extend digital life. It is, in a sense, an aggregator of post-mortem opportunities for geeks and paranoids. Make an online will? Easily! Schedule posts that will come out at the set dates and times after your death for several decades in advance? Easy! The main thing is that you have enough patience. And content. And money, of course.
Services with self-explanatory names like MyGoodbyeMessage or Dead Social offer a variety of options: from simply notifying all your friends on social networks and contacts in your notebook that you have passed into another world, to maintaining a profile after your death and vigil over the online grave of the deceased. In the latter case, the service undertakes to protect the account from hacking and spammers.
What happens to usernames after the death of their owners
Virtually nothing. Unfortunately, regulation of digital inheritance is still a practice of the future. Most of the laws, principles and behaviors regarding virtual death are yet to be developed in the coming years. With "beautiful" usernames, the situation today is about the same as it used to be with "beautiful" phone numbers: whoever did it, so did the sneakers.
True, in 2013, the only solution in this area on the Russian market so far appeared at the registrar Reg.ru, which, among other things, offers the option of a domain bequest. To do this with a username, alas, is now impossible.
Good news for cheaters
If postmodern discourse presupposes acceptance of the constant transformation of a person (you can change age, gender, race, etc.), then why not make a knight's move and replace the living with the dead? This question is asked by the authors of the series "Black Mirror", who devoted several episodes of the new season to the topic of creating a virtual copy of a person. The same reasoning in her column for The Guardian, journalist Olivia Solon. To discuss the problem of digital life after death, she invited Karl Heman, an employee of the Oxford Internet Institute. He claims that in the next 30 years alone, about 3 billion people will leave for another world, leaving zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes) of information on social networks, and corporations will try to benefit from this. “If keeping the accounts of the deceased is expensive, then companies will want to monetize it,” says Yeman.
So far, only AI startups such as Replika, headed by Russian entrepreneur Evgenia Kuida, are engaged in such developments. The project appeared as a reaction to the tragic death in an accident of Kuyda's friend Roman Mazurenko. Then Evgenia asked friends and relatives of the deceased to send her the logs of their correspondence with him on various social networks. The collected information was uploaded to the neural network, and soon a chatbot, or a virtual Luka avatar, appeared, which answers questions and replies from the user of the application of the same name as Roman would do.
Hossein Rahnama, an employee of the MIT Media Lab and Ryerson University, is also developing similar chatbots, who calls it "the concept of augmented immortality." It involves the creation of a program based on neural networks that not only stores the digital footprint of the deceased, but also “thinks” in an original way, that is, it can assess current events and share the opinion of a certain person after his death, as if his personality found the opportunity to continue life in car.
Rahnama believes that we will be able to communicate with long-dead scientists, politicians and show business stars in 30-40 years.
“Imagine we activate Ronald Reagan's profile and ask him what he thinks of Donald Trump,” Rahnama said in an interview.
According to the scientist, the generation of millennials is ready for such a development of events, because young people are used to sharing even the most insignificant information about themselves on social networks every day. So, in just the next 60 years, every millennial today will accumulate zettabytes of data.
Toronto psychologist Andrea Warnik that digital life after death is valuable primarily for relatives and friends of the deceased, because it has a therapeutic effect. In particular, Warnick is sure that many will resort to talking with such a virtual avatar not in order to find out his opinion, but in order to be listened to and heard. At the same time, technology can further detach an already grieving person from reality and plunge them into depression.
What will happen next
On the one hand, there is a possibility of the appearance of dimensionless abandoned online necropolises from existing pages of users of social networks and applications inhabited by zombie chatbots. On the other hand, the development of neural networks allows us to look into the future with optimism: not today, tomorrow Elon Musk will create a simple and cheap technology that allows us to “conserve” not only our accounts and the content they contain, but also ourselves and even our mortal bodies. It remains only to live up to this wonderful moment.
Every year, tens of millions of users appear on the Internet, they all register on social networks and leave terabytes of information there, and the virtual platforms themselves and the content stored on them have long acquired material value. Nevertheless, in fact, none of the services has a clear policy for identifying accounts of deceased people and working with such accounts.
What can be done with a deceased person's account
Today, most social networks offer either to "mothball" the account of the deceased, or to delete it.
Thus, the VKontakte press service claims that it always listens to the wishes of the relatives of the deceased: “One of the options for solving this issue is to increase the privacy of the page, when all the content posted on it becomes available only to friends, and the account is kept in that form, which he had at the time of the last visit to the site of its owner."
At the same time, it will not be possible to leave a public post on the page, send an invitation to friends from such a profile, comment on a photo or post on the wall - the account will exist with the content that the user himself added to it during his lifetime. It is also impossible to get access (login and password) to the memorial page - it is only allowed to observe the virtual existence of the deceased after death from the outside. Finally, you can completely delete the page, but in any case, you will have to contact support.
On Facebook, an heir (the so-called legacy contact) can be assigned during his lifetime. When the user dies, his authorized representative will have to send a special request to the support service of the social network. After it is confirmed, a special note (Remembering) will appear in the deceased's profile in front of the name, and the heir will be able to add an attached post to the page (for example, with an obituary or information about the date and place of farewell to the person), respond to new requests to add friends, change the userpic etc. At the same time, you will not be able to make changes to past entries, delete old photos or someone from your friends, or gain access to the personal correspondence of the deceased.
A similar option is available on Instagram, but Twitter has not yet formulated a clear position in relation to deceased users.
How else you can extend your digital life
Sites built on the Digital Beyond platform offer radical ways to extend digital life. It is, in a sense, an aggregator of post-mortem opportunities for geeks and paranoids. Make an online will? Easily! Schedule posts that will come out at the set dates and times after your death for several decades in advance? Easy! The main thing is that you have enough patience. And content. And money, of course.
Services with self-explanatory names like MyGoodbyeMessage or Dead Social offer a variety of options: from simply notifying all your friends on social networks and contacts in your notebook that you have passed into another world, to maintaining a profile after your death and vigil over the online grave of the deceased. In the latter case, the service undertakes to protect the account from hacking and spammers.
What happens to usernames after the death of their owners
Virtually nothing. Unfortunately, regulation of digital inheritance is still a practice of the future. Most of the laws, principles and behaviors regarding virtual death are yet to be developed in the coming years. With "beautiful" usernames, the situation today is about the same as it used to be with "beautiful" phone numbers: whoever did it, so did the sneakers.
True, in 2013, the only solution in this area on the Russian market so far appeared at the registrar Reg.ru, which, among other things, offers the option of a domain bequest. To do this with a username, alas, is now impossible.
Good news for cheaters
If postmodern discourse presupposes acceptance of the constant transformation of a person (you can change age, gender, race, etc.), then why not make a knight's move and replace the living with the dead? This question is asked by the authors of the series "Black Mirror", who devoted several episodes of the new season to the topic of creating a virtual copy of a person. The same reasoning in her column for The Guardian, journalist Olivia Solon. To discuss the problem of digital life after death, she invited Karl Heman, an employee of the Oxford Internet Institute. He claims that in the next 30 years alone, about 3 billion people will leave for another world, leaving zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes) of information on social networks, and corporations will try to benefit from this. “If keeping the accounts of the deceased is expensive, then companies will want to monetize it,” says Yeman.
So far, only AI startups such as Replika, headed by Russian entrepreneur Evgenia Kuida, are engaged in such developments. The project appeared as a reaction to the tragic death in an accident of Kuyda's friend Roman Mazurenko. Then Evgenia asked friends and relatives of the deceased to send her the logs of their correspondence with him on various social networks. The collected information was uploaded to the neural network, and soon a chatbot, or a virtual Luka avatar, appeared, which answers questions and replies from the user of the application of the same name as Roman would do.
Hossein Rahnama, an employee of the MIT Media Lab and Ryerson University, is also developing similar chatbots, who calls it "the concept of augmented immortality." It involves the creation of a program based on neural networks that not only stores the digital footprint of the deceased, but also “thinks” in an original way, that is, it can assess current events and share the opinion of a certain person after his death, as if his personality found the opportunity to continue life in car.
Rahnama believes that we will be able to communicate with long-dead scientists, politicians and show business stars in 30-40 years.
“Imagine we activate Ronald Reagan's profile and ask him what he thinks of Donald Trump,” Rahnama said in an interview.
According to the scientist, the generation of millennials is ready for such a development of events, because young people are used to sharing even the most insignificant information about themselves on social networks every day. So, in just the next 60 years, every millennial today will accumulate zettabytes of data.
Toronto psychologist Andrea Warnik that digital life after death is valuable primarily for relatives and friends of the deceased, because it has a therapeutic effect. In particular, Warnick is sure that many will resort to talking with such a virtual avatar not in order to find out his opinion, but in order to be listened to and heard. At the same time, technology can further detach an already grieving person from reality and plunge them into depression.
What will happen next
On the one hand, there is a possibility of the appearance of dimensionless abandoned online necropolises from existing pages of users of social networks and applications inhabited by zombie chatbots. On the other hand, the development of neural networks allows us to look into the future with optimism: not today, tomorrow Elon Musk will create a simple and cheap technology that allows us to “conserve” not only our accounts and the content they contain, but also ourselves and even our mortal bodies. It remains only to live up to this wonderful moment.
