‘Superwoman’ has left the chat, WhatsApp informed me recently. Superwoman was what I called my best friend; she passed away earlier this year. I do not know which algorithmic quirk brought this to pass — I had been holding on to the banal chat, reading and re-reading it — but the unexpected notification was immobilizing. Why did this sudden digital exit feel like I was losing her all over again?
The internet is changing how we respond to departure, and to the departed. Visiting graves or burial sites to talk to deceased loved ones is not unheard of. But now such interactions are carried with us on our digital devices in the form of voicemails, WhatsApp messages and Facebook posts. Researchers at the University of Warwick showed that people these days live in fear of losing data that belong to those who have died. The digital data of the dead is far more than code. The internet provides comfort by enabling a continuing relationship with the departed, but it is also causing a new anxiety — the fear of a second loss.
Social media was designed to be in touch with the living. But according to a 2019 paper from the University of Oxford Internet Institute, in 50 years, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. The social media giant has taken several measures to handle a user’s death. For instance, once the company is made aware of a user’s passing, that account becomes ‘memorialized’ — a place where friends and family members can gather to share messages and memories on the timeline of the deceased person. In 2015, Facebook started the option of nominating a legacy contact who would be in charge of a person’s account in the event of his/her passing. For Google, however, one is never deceased; just away from the computer for a long, long time. It does allow for reporting that an account belongs to a deceased person, but these options are not widely known. Worse, reporting a deceased person’s account often results in its removal, which is not ideal for the bereaved. The future of all past memories may well reside in the hands of a few digital behemoths in the Silicon Valley.
“We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?” — George Orwell’s 1984 had envisioned a dystopian future with ubiquitous government surveillance and omnipotence. Control over the past is no small matter, and consolidating that power in a single firm or a small number of powerful companies is every bit as problematic as handing it over to a totalitarian government. Yet, there are no laws when it comes to the ‘inheritance’ of the digital self. In 2012, a 15-year-old died in Germany. When her mother tried to access her Facebook account, she was unable to, because it had already been memorialized, without her knowledge. Locked out of the account, she was forced to go to court to try to gain access to her daughter’s profile. The court in Germany initially sided with her, but a ruling in an appeals court said that the right to private data outweighed any parental inheritance of information.
The complications lie in the fine print of the lengthy privacy policies that are rarely read and hurriedly signed over while creating social media accounts. Legal heirs may gain access to the digital content of a deceased person — often after legal cases involving international courts — but most of these documents contain clauses which stipulate that the tech firms own a lion’s share of the data uploaded on social media. This is not all. Facebook allows the appointment of one legacy contact, but nothing is said about what happens in the event of the death of both the owner of the data and the legacy contact.
Isn’t bereavement, the continuous process of trying and failing to comprehend the incomprehensible, taxing enough without adding to it long-drawn-out legal battles over who owns our memories?
