Luciana Demaría Artola is heir to one of the largest funeral homes in Uruguay. A few months ago posted a tweet where he offered to help with the deceased on Facebook: “If you have a deceased loved one, write to me and I’ll help you create a commemorative account or close their profile. Do not suffer,” she said. “It had a lot of repercussion,” explains Artola by phone. Because of her training in communication and family tradition, she has specialized in helping people with problems to convert a Facebook account into a commemorative one: “It all started because a French friend of hers died of her brother years ago. She told me how horrible it was that her profile was still active and warned her that it was her birthday, ”says Artola.
Over time, he has realized that this task can become part of the family funeral business: with most people online, digital burial will be just another facet of our lives. “Recently a 21-year-old boy died and was buried by a competing funeral home, but there they told him that I knew how to close accounts on networks. The mother came and told me to do it because she couldn’t take it anymore,” he explains. “The saddest thing I see is that there are many people who do not know that the person dies. And they write to them: ‘Hey how are you, how long’.
I offer this wholeheartedly. If you have a deceased loved one on Facebook, write to me and I’ll help you create a commemorative account or close their profile. Do not suffer.
– Luciana Demaría Artola (@lucianademaria) August 18, 2021
This concern is today less in our life in social networks. Death is not very digital and is a problem for few people at the moment. But in Meta’s latest investor call, the company first announced a global drop in daily active users. The idea of Facebook faltering seemed impossible a few years ago. But now, the new competition from TikTok and its focus on the virtual metaverse makes the option that Facebook will welcome more dead users than living users in a few decades and be a great digital cemetery, the largest graveyard in the history of humanity.
It is not something surprising. Professor Carl Öhman, from the Swedish University of Uppsala, did the calculations in a 2019 scientific paper: Will there be more dead than alive on Facebook in a few decades? He projected a couple of scenarios and in his most conservative numbers “the dead were going to outnumber the living on Facebook in about 50 years.” Perhaps it will be before, with what many people alive today will be able to observe this process: “The exact number of dead does not matter so much,” he explains by mail. “What matters is that it will be on a large scale. In the next three decades 2.2 billion people will die. Your data has to go somewhere. The problem is much bigger than a mere question of what year Facebook will have more dead profiles than alive, in fact, it is bigger than Facebook. Ultimately, it is about the long-term governance of the Internet,” he adds.
young people do not come
Meta is the emblem of the social media era. Facebook is the largest social network in the world with more than 2,000 million monthly users and Instagram, the second (if we do not count YouTube as a network) and is also owned by Meta. Not only that, the average age of Facebook users is also older, something that even Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted in October as a problem for its viability: “Over the last decade, as the audience in our applications has expanded and we have focused on serving everyone, our services have been adapted to the majority of the people who use them, instead of, specifically, to young people”, he said.
Facebook has aged and young people open fewer accounts. Its obsolescence is more than likely: “It is a problem in the medium term”, says Öhman. “That’s why so few people talk about it. Not a major concern in the next five years, but not hundreds of years from now either. Tech people like to talk about things that revolutionize the industry in an instant or science fiction things that will happen in centuries. But what is really important is what will happen in the medium term, between 20 and 60 years”, he adds.
Meta is in fact the only major company that has created “commemorative accounts” for the deceased, both on Facebook and Instagram. When someone dies, a close person, as Luciana Demaría Artola does, send the request together with a document that proves death and Facebook changes the account settings. The information is there for the people who saw it, you can write on the wall to remember the deceased, but it no longer sends birthdays or signs of activity.
Twitter, YouTube or TikTok offer only the option to deactivate the account, not to keep it as a digital tombstone where relatives gather to bring fake flowers. TikTok has such a young audience that in the form to deactivate an account death does not have its own category: you have to give the option “others”, say company sources.
Lack of legislation
But the challenges of this great digital cemetery are not limited to the will of the relatives and of Meta. Facebook will host a substantial part of the intimate history of the first half of the 21st century on its servers. Whose information is that? What kind of access will great-grandchildren or historians have? What archives will remain of our era? How will you respect the privacy of the deceased?
The European data protection legislation does not take into account for now the deceased. The personal data of deceased persons are excluded from the scope of application of the European regulation. When there is something, the regulation on personal data of the deceased is national. In Spain, the data protection law establishes that the relatives of the deceased may request access to their personal data, its rectification or deletion.
But this depends, of course, on Meta continuing to exist and keeping Facebook going. What will happen the day that, for example, two thirds of Facebook users are killed? What benefit will Facebook get from continuing to keep those servers running? “I am concerned about the lack of legislation,” says Law Professor Natalie Lynner of Drake University (Iowa, USA). “Companies are free to create their own rules and policies regarding the death of a user and they vary widely,” she says.
Not only that, but there are also doubts about what benefit can be derived from the pages of your ancestors. “Platforms will reinvent themselves to adapt to market forces. Users wanted to see the Facebook pages of their loved ones, so Facebook started allowing memorial pages. I imagine that Facebook is working to generate new ideas to recover the loss of users and add more activity to the platform”, adds Professor Lynner.
Richard Whitt, a former Google employee and now president of the Glia Foundation, is more critical of this option: “Too many of these companies are only financially motivated. Can they be trusted to serve our best interests, especially over multiple generations? What are the chances that these companies will survive for 30, 40, 50 years to be available and provide ‘digital graveyard’ services?”, he wonders.
Perhaps there is another viable option for these companies once the dead outnumber the living. They may value the ability to predict grandchildren’s behavior based on their grandparents’ Facebook activity: “Data from deceased people can be mined to gain insights into their living descendants,” says Öhman. “I may not have any information about you, but if I know everything about your parents, I can make qualified inferences,” he adds.
Whose is the past?
The fight for personal data and its access are the two great challenges. ”Whoever controls the past also controls the present. If Facebook and Google gain a monopoly on our digital past, we put ourselves in danger as a society. Not because the people who work there are bad, but because no institution should have that much power over how we relate to the past,” says Öhman.
The debate doesn’t even end there, Öhman continues, because if a 2070 historian wants to study #BlackLivesMatter or #metoo, the information on Facebook will be valuable. But where will he be and whose will he be? “The narrative is the data. But that data is digital remains of people. It seems difficult to protect posthumous privacy and allow researchers to study the past. We have to see where to draw the line,” says Öhman, who proposes creating a Digital World Heritage label, similar to that of Unesco for culture. For those who say that there is only garbage on the internet, in his article Öhman recalls how part of our knowledge of ancient civilizations comes from their garbage.
This is not the only path of conservation. For private data Whitt suggests another, although it implies willingness and investment on the part of the future decedent. “As Vint Cerf, my mentor and friend, says, our ancestors may end up knowing less about the early 21st century than we do about the early 20th. It will take a concerted effort, through business models and data technologies and government policies, to ensure digital preservation,” explains Whitt.
Whitt knows a British company called Emortal that has developed digital archives that preserve the digital legacy of families through the ages, beyond software and platform updates, in exchange for 4.99 euros per month, which is then assumed by a fund of the company. Cerf himself has theorized about digital obsolescence or the “bit rot”.
Emortal allows you to have a folder on the desktop where each user uploads what they want to be left of it for the future: “If you want to keep the messages, for example, from Instagram, that is something that is quite sure to be lost because nobody will save it” says its founder, Colin Culross. “None of them, particularly those businesses, will be present. There is no guarantee that all of this exists. It will all go away,” he adds.
This method ensures the conservation of digital files, but they remain only in the hands of their heirs, at the expense of what they want to do with that information. A global solution is more complex.
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