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Illinois Prof Calls for a Federal Law To Safeguard Digital Afterlives
An anonymous reader writes "A new paper from Professor Jason Mazzone at the University of Illinois calls for federal laws to regulate what happens to digital accounts after the account holder's death. Mazzone argues that Facebook and other online services have policies for deceased users' accounts that do not adequately protect the individual property and privacy interests at stake. The full text of the paper (called "Facebook's Afterlife") is also available: "
And yet, grieving relatives are likely susceptible targets for all sorts of different advertising that can still be targeted at them based on inferred interests they may share with the deceased. Call me cynical, but I'm sure they can come up with plenty of business reasons for keeping around data on a deceased person. Not only that, but they need to ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent deletions from occurring prematurely, such as an ex using private information to signal that you are dead, otherwise they may open themselves up to all sorts of problems if they go around deleting user information.
Outside of nefarious uses, the information of a dead person is of no pactical value to facebook or its advertising customers. Dead people don't buy anything.
But their shopping habits can still be used to predict what the living will buy.
To me the bigger question is things like the ownership of games on steam, your magic the gathering online card collection, your MMO account, and so forth. These things have value, and the parasitic EULA's claiming you don't have ownership of anything while the main sites flog you to "buy! buy! buy!"notwithstanding its clear that the survivors will often have a very real interest in these things. My kids have characters on my MMO account. My entire family plays my steam games. I never got into MTGO precisely because of the ephemeral nature of the cards... but lots of other people do have valuable collections.
If anything we should have laws to ensure this stuff does get passed to the survivors without hassle.
I don't want my Facebook deleted in the event of my death! My friends would lose all of the photos I posted of them! And all the comments and links and everything I posted on their timelines. And what if they want to come back years later and reminisce about old times. There are lots of reasons living customers might want to look at the information. Wouldn't it be better to freeze the account?
"I don't want my Facebook deleted in the event of my death!"
And if your friends don't want their photo kept after your death? What if they want to forget you? What if they want to move on? What would you have, a friends list and a dead friends list, and watch the dead friends list get longer and longer, and the friends list get shorter and shorter?
Facebook: Bobby5765 had died, we've automatically moved him to the dead friends list.
1 year later,
Facebook: Bobby5765 died one year ago, why not come visit his page, he'd have liked that.
2 months later
Facebook: Was Bobby5765's using his real name?
3 months later
Facebook: Did Bobby5765 have any relatives? Why not connect with them by selecting them from his contacts list below.
4 months later
Facebook: Bobby5765's friends indicated you're his son, we're sorry for your loss, why not remember Bobby5765 by visiting old photographs of him.
Moving on is important. What you want done with YOUR digital data after your death should be an account choice you make, not another data mining opportunity for Facebook. Default should be 'delete after 6 months'. Then your friends can archive anything they want on their site or computer.
What I don't want to see, is Facebook milking dead relatives for marketing purposes.
It was Facebook that really got my Mom into this whole "Computer thing". Since she passed, we have used her account as a hub for pictures, gatherings, and contacts. I see the point of eventually deleting her account, but it was surprising how many images and data that was singularly relevant to my family that was on her account that isn't recorded elsewhere... I would never have known the depth of her digital involvement if I didn't review her account. It's been priceless for my family. My two cents.
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
I can't tell you how important my late wife's facebook account is to me. It is betond money. I realize I'm not 'entitled' to it. And that one day it will die too. Maybe at the hands of a troll (they already hacked her twitter acc to do pharma spam). Or a data center outage. Or a change in policy. Whatever. Nothing is for ever.
But for the time it is there, it is greater than any scrap book, photo album or other personal treasure. Neither of us care greatly about advertisers using the data. It is a detailed, personal record of the happiest time I'm ever likely to have. So deletion would not get my vote! If it were deleted I would certainly want to download a copy first. I know I'm not entitled to it, but again, it's what I'd want...
Because you can - or because you should?