Technology
When people die, there are things that remind us of them. It is emotionally difficult for most of us to review photos of a loved one, old letters, and personal items when deciding what to do with them.
This is complicated these days by the presence of social media pages like Facebook and Google+, which are just another part of digital life. The law provides for how loved ones can dispose of physical objects left after death. But what about virtual ones?
Some US states are trying to resolve this issue. Oklahoma was one of the first. State law allows friends and family — and most importantly, the executor of the will — to gain control over Facebook accounts (if the deceased lived in that state). Nebraska is proposing similar measures, and some preliminary work on this issue is underway in Oregon. In New York, a proposal is being put forward to call a “digital executor”.
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Indiana have laws that provide for actions related to email and electronic files, but it is far from clear whether these laws also apply on Facebook.
Facebook has a policy that states that accounts can be switched to the so-called “memorial mode” after a person dies. The profile stops appearing on the offer pages and the privacy settings are set to “friends only”. However, the company claims that registration information is not provided to everyone. In at least one case, the mother of a young man who died in an accident was unable to access his page. Comments on one Facebook blog show that others face such problems as well.
At the same time, there are a number of applications that allow a person to control their digital afterlife. The If I die website, for example, offers a way for three people to confirm that the owner of a Facebook page is actually dead. Entrustet, Legacy Locker, and SecureSafe offer options for the latest status update. I-Tomb offers a “virtual graveyard”.
However, no one thought much about this before. One factor — aside from the novelty of social media in general — is that most users are still young. Only a small number of Facebook users, about 6 percent, are over 65 years old. The average age of people on Facebook is 38, according to a study by the Pew Research Center and the American Life Project. These numbers don't vary much for other sites either.
This means that, in general, people who use such sites are not yet thinking about wills. But that could very well change as the generation that is in its prime is getting older, and death, regrettably, becomes a little more real. (There's an old joke that a person realizes they're getting old when they start scanning friends' obituaries).
However, we are likely to hear more about digital asset litigation, especially if they contain something that has a monetary equivalent. For example, a deceased model's Facebook page may include photos taken by professional photographers. The family of the deceased may be asked to delete the profile. In any case, new laws should clarify the situation.