Gibbs ponders death online
In February last year Dan, a friend who I had never met, died. We knew each other only through a private e-mail list that we had both belonged to for over a decade and his death was very sad. He was a really smart, witty man and his passing was, to say the least, untimely.
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Then a few days ago, Anne Marie Merritt, another denizen of the list posted the following: “LinkedIn just listed our dearly departed friend [Dan] as someone I may know, asking if I want to connect with him. / Though the answer is a resounding YES, I am pretty sure that LinkedIn is not going to be able to handle this, as [Dan] is likely not interested in linking with me again until the day I jack into the same interconnect he’s on. And I’m not going to an internet medium.”
It turns out that our late friend’s LinkedIn account still exists and after more than a year the machinery in the bowels of the service, obeying its mysterious social networking algorithms, finally managed to draw a dotted line between Anne Marie and Dan.
This kind of thing is very weird and creepy and something that’s happening with increasing frequency because Internet users, and the various communications and social networking services they use, mostly haven’t developed protocols to handle the virtual death of someone.
That’s not to say that it never gets handled smoothly. When my goddaughter passed away last year I was able to manage her Facebook account simply because I knew her password. I was able to post a notice on her “wall” so her friends knew what had happened along with an e-mail address so they could get in contact with her family. Then, as her family wished, shortly after the funeral I deleted the account.
The problem for most people is that when a friend or loved one dies, that level of administrative access to their account is usually not available.
It’s interesting to see how the various social networking services handle, or don’t handle, the issue of what to do with the accounts of users who have passed away. While most of the minor services currently ignore the issue, the big boys are trying to get sound policies in place.
Twitter recently published its procedure, Facebook’s process has been around since late last year, and LinkedIn has had a policy in place for some time.
A big concern with any protocol for dealing with deceased member accounts is that if there are procedural weaknesses there’s a risk of the service being “gamed” by bad guys and, consequently, the untimely virtual death of members.
Another problem is that in most cases we have no idea what the deceased would have actually wanted; I’d guess that specifying the disposition of your virtual remains in your will is pretty much unexplored territory. This means we’re left wondering what the departed would have preferred. Would they want all their digital traces removed or archived or maybe only certain content kept in memoriam (for example, just their blog and or their Flickr account).
So, should the departed’s content be frozen and left online? In the case of Facebook, should postings to the deceased’s “wall” be disabled? And what happens if what friends want conflicts with those of the departed’s family? Or, even trickier, what to do when different family members want different things done with the departed’s content?
But that’s not all: There are also the e-mail accounts and the content of the deceased’s computer (or computers). What should be done with the gigabytes or even terabytes of digital “stuff”?
Another friend on the list, Art Medlar, wrote: “When I go I don’t want my online life deleted too. I want the bitrotting HTML to age like a winged skull on a New England headstone.”
So, tell me, when you shuffle off this mortal coil, what should be done with the remains of your digital life? Do you want a virtual online tombstone or should it all be sent to the bit bucket in the sky?
Gibbs ponders his finitude in Ventura, Calif. Your terminal thoughts to backspin@gibbs.com.
