What is Digital Death?
By Jesse Davis on Oct 14 th, with 2 COMMENTS
The term “digital death” has been floated around a lot lately. In fact, there was even a Digital Death Day in California and London! And this recent Mashable article discusses the 7 best services for all things related to digital death. But what is “digital death,” after all? When in doubt, you can do a Google search and find a Wikipedia article, right? Wrong. There’s really nothing out there that clearly defines this digital death term all that well. So, I’ll attempt to do it from our perspective here at Entrustet.
Digital death is actually a bit of a misnomer. Digital death actually refers to a physical death, coupled with a death-defying online presence that is immune to physical death. That is, the term “digitial death” ultimately refers to digital life outstanding a physical death. But for simplicity sake, and frankly because it sounds good, “digital death” will continue to mean basically everything related to this issue of humans dying and leaving traces of their life behind in digital form that will last forever until something is done with it.
Although we will all die as human beings, our digital footprint will last forever if untouched. Otherwise, our digital bits will meet one of the following fates: 1) intentionally deletion by a friend/family member, 2) transferred to an heir, or 3) some accounts may be deleted by service provider due to lack of use or fraudulent activity.
The important takeaway here is that you can control exactly what your own digital death (or virtual life) will look like long after you’re gone. In fact, you can do it for free and decide down to each individual account and computer file what your lasting digital legacy will be.
October 15, 2010 at 12:07 am, Shane Skillen said:
What is Digital Death?: Although we will all die as human beings, our digital footprint will last forever if untou… http://bit.ly/97c93K
October 29, 2010 at 1:13 pm, Thomas Fressin said:
What is digital death ? http://bit.ly/bqXH0o