Your Facebook account is your online persona and an account where you archive photos, relationships, your blogs, personal or professional communications, videos and the like that speak of you and your life. Like the Facebook account, you are using a range of other online accounts where you have divided various streams of communications and components of your life. Your Picasa online album conserves all your memorabilia including photos and videos. Your Gmail account archives vast resources of data. There can be and several other accounts too that may carry your digital self. In order to keep all your data safe, you backup and secure everything. ‘Cloud’ is one technology, increasingly becoming popular, that people generally are using these days. It ensures that we find all our data intact, after we wake up. But what happens to the data in case we do not wake up, one day, when we die? Is there a way to decide heirs and leave our digital stuff in their hands?
To pass right or not?
We often have online accounts that we choose our family members not to know about – what if they get their hands on those embarrassing information or photos, once we are gone? Is there a way that we can maintain our privacy for our digital stuff eternally? Well, there are some sites like Yahoo! that completely delete users’ digital assets including user identity and content and prevent access from other people while receiving a copy of death certificate to preserve confidentiality of users. On the other hand, YouTube allows declaration of an heir and transfers the access of its users’ content along with a webpage, instructing heirs while they get access to the account and content. Google has this automated process of deleting content and access to an account, which has been noticed inactive for nine months.
Memorial service
Facebook has kept its policy a little bit sophisticated. Facebook keeps the profile in ‘Memorial State, once it is aware that the account holder has passed away. In the ‘Memorial State’ status, some parts of the profile and certain features like contact information, status updates are kept covered from viewing to preserve privacy of the deceased Facebook account holder. Friends of that account owner will be able to see the profile and leave messages on the Wall. Thus, friends can form groups and express their mourning for the departed account owner.
There are a number of websites that have emerged to help you plan and designate beneficiaries or ‘heirs’ who you want to carry out and conserve your account credentials and content. Legacy Locker, DataInherit and Entrustet are the digital afterlife planning websites to help you decide ‘digital executors’ and take care of your online accounts.
As you mentioned most major websites have vague policies when it comes to deceased user accounts. Gmail’s process especially is quite tedious and can take more than 6-8 months! To safeguard our online interests we must take measures to pass on all login info alongwith our wishes to our heirs. World Without Me is a comprehensive digital afterlife planning website where you can create, store and pass on your digital legacy to your heirs.