Death is that uncomfortable certainty that no one wants to address and that always comes at a bad time. Last wills can serve to leave physical and earthly matters well tied up, but what happens with our WhatsApp messages, Instagram profiles and other social media accounts, and the data that we have stored or have in emails? The deceased’s Internet activity remains in the cloud, inaccessible and indefinitely, for his family and friends.
Times have changed and today’s society lives on two planes: the physical and the digital. And while it is common to leave a written document with the last wills and distribution of assets in the event of death, the importance of managing our digital legacy is rarely considered. Social networks, messaging applications, emails… everything remains active and in the cloud, and sometimes, with compromising content. Borja Adsuara, an expert lawyer in digital law, refers to the regulation of this content as “digital inheritance, the set of digital goods and services that are left when one dies.”
Who is in control?
This is a complex issue, since companies that offer online services – such as Google, Apple or Facebook, among others – have very strict privacy policies that regulate access to the accounts of deceased users. One of the most notorious cases in this regard took place in Germany in 2012, when a teenager was killed by a train and her parents demanded that Facebook provide access codes to her account to determine the possible causes. It had to be a judge who, years later, I gave them the reason and will force Mark Zuckerberg’s firm to give them the password. “In that case it was the judge who ruled that knowing what had happened had more value in the balance than the person’s privacy,” explains Adsuara.
Some allow close family members to request account closure, but full access to information is rarely granted without explicit consent from the original account holder. That is, the account owner must appoint a heir of the account, or specify that you want the account to survive, as a tribute, and to do so, determine which contact will manage it. These people are called legacy contacts, who will be responsible for keeping the account alive by responding to or moderating messages and occasionally uploading souvenir photos. In this sense, without adequate preparation, this maze of regulations leaves families in an uncomfortable and often emotionally draining position.
Ethical and legal problems
The law is not fully adapted to this new paradigm. Accessing an account without explicit permission is illegal in many places, regardless of good intentions. This not only puts loved ones in a difficult situation, but also raises ethical questions about the privacy and ownership of post-mortem digital information. Another highly publicized case took place after the tragic San Bernardino shooting: the FBI asked Apple to unlock the iPhone of the shooter and the Cupertino company flatly refused, arguing that the privacy of its customers took precedence over the dissemination. of the possible contents of the device.
Google, the great container of personal information on the Internet, also contemplates this posthumous legacy, and those who want to leave everything well tied up, can begin to name a inactive account manager, someone responsible for saying what happens to the deceased’s information. If this figure has not been named, the Californian firm allows those close to you to delete or manage the account through a formbut this process is more complex, since, as we have seen, the privacy of the owner and the will of his family collide.
In this sense, Adsuara remembers that part of this content can affect the image of the deceased; Unknown relationships with third parties or compromising material may be found: “For example, if you access your wife or husband’s Twitter account and you find direct messages of intimate content from a third person…” she explains. Brigita Kavaliauskaite, head of communications at the security firm NordVPNadds: “In Spain, no specific law has been approved that regulates the post mortem digital oblivion total, but Law 10/2017 on digital wills does exist. However, the legislation needs to be broader, so that all circumstances are covered.”
Preparation and forecast
To avoid these problems, detailed planning is necessary. The first step is to take an inventory of all accounts and passwords. This catalog must be accessible to someone you trust in the event of death. “The best thing is to designate a trusted person who can indicate to the app or social network that you are enabled to manage this information,” explains Adsuara. Other cloud services, such as Dropbox, also consider the death scenario, allowing loved ones to access request to the account of the deceased.
It is equally prudent to draft a digital will with explicit instructions on how online information should be handled. However, this expert warns of the risk of confusing terms: an inheritance signed at a notary is not the same as a digital one. The second refers to “who has the right to access my email or social media accounts, for example.”
Our digital life is an extension of our physical existence, loaded with memories, personal data and social connections. There will be things that we want to leave in our memory, but others that we want to remain inaccessible and be go with us. A digital diary, conversations with friends or acquaintances on WhatsApp… This type of content has no more value than personal value, but it can damage the posthumous image of the deceased. How to ensure that no one will have access to it?
There are only two ways to ensure the inaccessibility of this information: delete it, or have end-to-end encryption, so that no one, not even the service provider, is able to access the content. Services like Nordlocker either Vault Dropbox guarantee that no one who does not have the keys will ever be able to access what is stored; So much so, that there are several warnings that the owner must grant, recognizing the loss of data in case of not knowing the keys.
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