Note: This is a guest post by Justin Toladro of Life Insurance Finder from Australia

A legacy has been part of human nature since the beginning of time.  Old wisdom prescribed ‘planting a tree’ and bearing a son to carry on a legacy, to gain a sense of immortality, and to leave something behind that is sure to outlive us.

Many write books, blogs, and have obtained a strong online presence, which equates to a lengthy and diverse digital legacy.

A digital legacy is quite different than a physical legacy that includes a son, or a tree or any other kind of physical treasure.  It is a part of us that contains our innermost thoughts, our political and religious beliefs, our love letters and what makes us who we are.  It is something that is not quite tangible, but yet, is accessible.

Yet, to some of our friends and family, this digital legacy, with all of its photographs, mementos, emails and posts, may be an even more satisfying and lasting memory of our lives and how we lived them, to pass on to our children, grandchildren and friends and loved ones.

We live in a digital world that is rapidly replacing the physical word, as far as documentation, and personal data.  Everything is emailed, faxed and downloaded, and most of us even pay our bills online, and carry on all of our financial matters there as well.

But what happens to that legacy when we die?  Where does it go and what remains of our digital selves after our Digital Death?

Why digital data should be preserved:

When someone dies, most of the digital information that they created and participated in, such as profiles in many of the social network sites, or business identities, stays behind.

Deciding what part of your digital self you’d like to see remain can mean what part of your personal legacy you leave behind.  The decision of course, is yours, but what if you die before you make a decision about that digital legacy? What is left of you after your death if there are no instructions in which to guide your legacy?

And what exactly is out there to see that you’d not be particularly proud?

Importance of digital data:

Mark Raby of TG Daily, says “38% of Americans would rather lose their wedding ring than all the files on their computer, and that’s just the beginning of the insights provided by a new study on the importance of digital data.”  Although these statistics are sketchy, I mean how many people are going to admit this?  The truth is, our computers and data are what most of our lives revolve around.  Everything we do, care about, feel and believe are resting somewhere out in cyberspace.

Preserving your digital data:

Raby says that most people do not even back up this critical data.  So, a great start would be a back up system to ensure that those critical photos, documents, music and other online information is safe, and will not be lost should you experience a hard drive crash.

Another method many people use is a ‘flash drive’.  This is an exterior drive that condenses your information and stores it off the computer should a crash occur, and can act as a guide for family and friends, as well.  It can contain sensitive information that can be locked in a safe, or other secure method to be opened upon your death.

Digital Will:

This is one document that will not only benefit you and how you want to leave your digital legacy, whether it remains or is removed after your death, and is also a guideline to how you want your family to see your legacy.  Do you want personal information left in email accounts, or social network sites?

This is the place to state your wishes, and also give family and friends access to what you feel is appropriate.

Creating a digital will is not difficult, most times it is just attached to an existing will or living trust.

Start a list and keep it updated:

Making a list of all of your online activities for a month would be a great start to recording and keeping the important digital legacy that is you.  Suggestions are to begin by creating a document in a word processing system, which allows links to specific sites.

Adding user ID’s and passwords, as well as what data is there can relieve even the most computer savvy person, when and if something happens to you.

This document should be incorporated into the digital will you’ve created and should be kept with a person you trust, or a legal representative to be given access only to the people you have chosen to give access.

Keeping your online data safe, stored, easily accessible and edited for content will leave a lasting digital legacy for which you can be proud.

Tags:

death insurance · digital death · Digital Estate Planning · life insurance

On Monday, Ryan Dunn of Jackass fame was killing when he crashed his Porsche while driving drunk and going over 132 mph.  The photos of his car were unrecognizable.  On Monday, right after he died, he had about 30,000 Twitter followers.  Two days later, he has close to 130,000. An incriminating picture of Dunn drinking beers with his friends 2 hours before the crash has been deleted.

Fans flooded to Facebook and Twitter to mourn Dunn’s death and over 100,000 people decided to follow him.  Why is this?  What’s the point of following a dead person who no longer going to be able to tweet?  My guess is the 100,000 people who followed him after his death wanted to be closer to him and are using “follow” like a “facebook like” button.  They obviously know that Dunn won’t be tweeting anymore, but want to show their support and their only options are to send an @reply to his account and follow him.  Ever since the start of the internet, people have been expressing their loss online, but I think Twitter is an interesting development in human mourning.  It’s a medium that allows people to reach out and connect so easily, but does not have a mechanism to deal with user deaths.  It doesn’t have a mechanism to help people grieve.  And like the rest of the Internet, it wasn’t built to have it.

Social networks are the first sites where death has become a major issue.  Three Facebook users die every single minute.  Our friends over at 1000 Memories created a way for people to remember the deceased online in a much better way that just following a dead person.  They allow people to create memorial pages for deceased people and then others can view the memorial, comment and interact.  I think we will see a proliferation of online services to deal with issues surrounding the internet and death.  There has to be a better outlet for showing support and easing the pain of losing someone you cared about than follow their now defunct twitter account that will never send another tweet.

What do you think?  Why do you think people follow people who die on Twitter?  How do you think the internet will evolve to help deal with death?

HT: Javiera Quiroga

Tags:

dead twitter users · digital death · following dead people on twitter · ryan dunn death · ryan dunn twitter followers death · twitter following deaceased users

The second annual Digital Death Day is set to be held on May 6th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Digital Death Day (DDD for short) is held in the style of an “un-conference.” At an un-conference, the participants gather and propose topics to be discussed. Then they break out into groups and someone leads the candid discussion around those particular topics. I think this is a great way to hold a conference. Many presentations and keynotes at typical conferences come off as overly scripted and formulaic, but this is certainly not the case at un-conferences.

DDD is perfect for:

• People planning their Digital Wills
• Online Social Networks
• Companies offering services for digital afterlife management
• Death Care Professionals
• Estate Planners
• Legacy Planners
• End of Life Planners
• Death Attorneys
• Hospice volunteers
• Clergy

If you live in or around the Bay Area, or want to visit the city’s beautiful weather, incredible restaurants, and undeniably “startup” atmosphere, come to DDD on May 6th. I’ll see ya there! Register below:

REGISTER HERE

Tags:

DDD · digital death · digital death day 2011 · identity workshops

Caroline Wimmer was brutally murdered by Calvin Lawson on March 28, 2009, “over allegations that she’d told his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, that he was cheating on her with another woman.”  She was beaten and then strangled with a hair dryer cord.  When the EMT, Mark Musarella, showed up at the scene, he used his Blackberry to take a photo of Ms. Wimmer’s corpse.  He later posted that photo to Facebook (he claims accidentally).  The family is distraught, even two years after their daughter was murdered.

“I’m just very upset and traumatized over all this,” said Mrs. Wimmer, of Rosebank, fighting back tears on the steps of state Supreme Court, St. George. “I haven’t had a chance to heal yet. This is the second anniversary. We really need to improve our laws in New York. … My daughter’s picture was on the Internet and I can’t get it back.”

“To know those pictures are on Facebook for anyone to see kills me,” said Christina Criscitiello, the victim’s older sister, her voice cracking. “She was brutally beaten. I feel like Mark Musarella took the last shred of dignity she had left. I can’t get those images out of my head. and I don’t want anybody else to see them.”

Musarella was later fired and charged with official misconduct and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.  He pled guilty and performed 200 hours of community service and had his EMT license taken away.  His official misconduct charge was vacated, so only his disorderly conduct charge is on his permanent record.

The family is now suing pretty much everyone involved, which brings up some very interesting legal issues.  The family’s attorney believes that Facebook does not have any financial liability:

The Wimmers’ lawyer, Ravi Batra of Manhattan, said federal law provides Facebook “absolute immunity” as a “supposed … nonprofit community bulletin board” from being sued for cash compensation.

This law was created to prevent website owners from being sued for content their members post, as the bulletin boards are simply methods for individuals to release information.  One can sue the poster, but not the medium.  I fully support this part of the law, assuming there are exceptions that revoke this immunity if a company willfully continues to host an image that should be taken down.

The family also wants Facebook to delete all of the images and provide them with a list of all of the users who accessed the photos while they were online.  They also want Facebook to change it’s policies.  Says their attorney:

Batra, the lawyer, said Facebook needs to more closely monitor the images users post and that stricter laws must be crafted regarding photo postings. The Wimmers contend the social networking giant is valued at $50 billion and has more than 600 million active users.

“If they’re uploading 10 million pictures a month, they need more screeners,” he said. “We need future victims, if there are any, to [be able to] hold Facebook accountable.”

The problem with the attorney’s argument is that over 2.5 BILLION images are uploaded to Facebook each month, not the 10 million he claims.  In fact, there are 960 photos uploaded to Facebook every single second.  The attorney’s figure is reached in 3 hours, not an entire month.  And those are stats from 2009!  It’s likely even higher today, as Facebook has grown by about 200m people since 2009.  It’s physically impossible for Facebook to manually screen the images that are uploaded to their servers.

They could implement some sort of “dead body recognition algorithm” but I don’t think that’s feasible either.  Facebook’s current system of asking users to flag pictures that are inappropriate works fairly well.  I do agree it could be improved upon, but it’s not reasonable to ask Facebook to monitor every single image that’s uploaded.

The case also raised the issue of how someone charged with official misconduct for posting a photo of a dead person on Facebook should be punished:

Tomorrow, [the family] will join state Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn), Assemblyman Michael Cusick (D-Mid-Island) and the rest of the borough’s Albany delegation to announce the introduction of a bill that would raise the criminal classification of official misconduct to a Class E felony.

Currently, official misconduct is a misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail. A Class E felony is punishable by up to one and a third to four years in prison.

“It’s sad we have to do this, but the law has to catch up with modern technology,” Ms. Savino said yesterday in a telephone interview. “We don’t want families victimized twice.”

I think that we need to take a step back before changing the law just for official misconduct and see if we should make a law making posting a photo of a deceased person on the Internet, without the family’s permission, illegal.  There are laws against mutilating a corpse and I’d argue that posting a photo online is the digital equivalent.  States should pass laws that set a standard for how this behavior will be punished, and hopefully raise awareness that posting photos of deceased people is extremely hurtful to the family.  I can see a nursing home worker posting a picture of a deceased person on Facebook (in fact, I bet it’s already happened).

As our society moves forward and technology becomes an even bigger part, we need to create rules and social norms that show what is acceptable and what is not.  Clearly posting photos of a murder victim crosses the line completely.  I’d make posting the photo of a murder victim online punishable by 30 days in jail and a big fine, with escalators for longer jail terms if it’s done maliciously.

It’s sad that we need to cross this bridge, but in the age of social media and instant sharing, it’s a needed step forward.

Tags:

caroline wimmer · dead body on facebook · digital death · digital death laws · facebook corpse · facebook death · mark musarella · social networking death · social networking issues

Jesse’s panel on Digital Death at this year’s South By Southwest 2011 was a huge hit.  There were over 150 people in the audience, including a reporter from the Guardian of London.  Jemima Kiss wrote about how digital assets are changing the way we grieve and deal with death.  From the article:

The big theme was consumer web technology powering into every part of the mainstream. As a particularly resonant session showed, this advance has gone so far that it is now seeping into how we think about death, and the digital legacy we might leave behind. John Romano of the specialist news site The Digital Beyond told how the family of one soldier killed in Iraq were refused access to his emails by Yahoo, how one author’s entire online body of work was deleted by a family who did not like it, and how one man struggled to wrest control of his dead wife’s Facebook page from abusive commenters.

Taboo, combined with a lack of prioritisation, means there is much to be done in creating a standard framework for sites to deal with processing death. Facebook has a form for reporting a dead account holder that only requires a link to a news report or memorial site as proof of death, which means anyone can take control of that account. Jesse Davies, of the digital asset management tool Entrustet, explained that hidden in Google’s terms and conditions are instructions on taking control of a deceased person’s account by printing and posting multiple documentation. “This is the same Google,” he said, “that just taught a car to drive itself.”

There are now 40 startups in the digital death field, and things have never look less morbid. From memorialisation to digital estate planning for all the data associated with sites on which we buy, share, live and play, digital death is a growth area. “One day we all buy the farm,” said Davies. “We’ll leave behind a mountain of data and mixed in with junk about stuff we’ve sold on eBay will be photos of our kids. We need a way to deal with this.” Despite being ghettoised in a venue several blocks from the main conference, which limited the amount of “cross-pollination” from other subject areas – usually a strength of SXSW – the new journalism sessions were often impressive. The New York Times’s interactive editor, Aron Pilhofer, argued convincingly against news apps as the future of news, saying the browser is the logical central focus for content development. “Community is a place where the web is your friend and the app is not,” he said. “If you consider community to be part of the answer to the future of news then going into the partially-stilted environment of the application walks away from that.” The omnipresent media commentator Jeff Jarvis led a session on privacy vs publicness by reliving deeply personal details of his experience of dealing with prostate cancer. Going public defied the physical impotence, prompting advice and support from readers and encouraging others to go for checkups.

Tags:

#digitaldeath · digital death · digital death report · Digital Property Report · sxsw