Registration Of Deaths For Online Services

Dear visitor,

It's all too easy to think of online services like GMail or Flickr or Dreamhost as being ephemeral. We like to think that our use of them is just temporary and that we'll outlive them, and it's true that many people will only use an online service for a few months or a few years before switching to another one. But an essential point remains: what if our accounts on these services do outlive us? What happens to the data we've stored with them, when we die?

At the time of writing this, two of my Facebook friends are dead. They created the accounts before they died (the accounts weren't created for them posthumously) and probably didn't give too much thought to the long-term ramifications. Now, Facebook has automated systems that encourage users to reconnect with friends they haven't heard from in a while, so I've had messages from Facebook saying things like, "Why don't you poke so-and-so? Help make Facebook better for him!" That's alright, and even quite nice, when it refers to a living person: it is good, I think, to be reminded to keep in touch with one's friends. But I find receiving messages like that about someone who died to be upsetting. No doubt it's also upsetting for the many other Facebook users who have dead Facebook friends.

The risk of upsetting a deceased's friends and relatives by referring to them as though they were still alive isn't the only one that online services run. They also risk inappropriately retaining or deleting documents created by or sent to the deceased. In the pre-internet age, a person's next of kin would have access to the deceased's physical archive: letters received, documents written and kept, keys to safes, and so on. These things can be tremendously important to the next of kin. First of all, they almost certainly hold sentimental value. Secondly, they may have strong practical value; for example: letters received, address books, diaries and so on can help the bereaved to work out who to invite to a funeral or memorial service and how to contact them. Contracts can help the executor of the person's estate determine whether the deceased owed anyone, or was owed him/herself, any money or services. Finally, they may be of value in other ways, for instance to historians or to publishers.

Having a physical archive of things like this in one's home or office or some other obvious place means that next of kin can access them in the event of death. However, storing documents and virtual keys (passwords) online doesn't provide the same ease of access. Without access to your email account, would your next of kin even know which online services you'd signed up to? What if you've got several email accounts and the login details of your other online service accounts are scattered throughout them? What if some of those accounts are for services which will close your account and delete all your data if you don't maintain a regular payment? After all, one's bank accounts and credit cards are typically frozen when one dies.

I don't want to give the impression that the fault lies with the online services: Facebook's electronic systems can't know which of its users have died until someone tells them. Companies that people pay to store electronic documents safely also can't tell, just because a customer stops paying and stops replying to emails, whether this is because the customer has died or because the customer simply doesn't want the service any more. Increasingly, the online service industry is coming to understand the need to make arrangements for archiving a user's account in the event of that user's death. The difficulties, however, are threefold. First, each company that writes a policy for handling this situation is reinventing the wheel: there's been no industry-wide effort, as far as I know, to create a code of conduct for online services to follow when users pass away. Secondly, for the executor of the deceased's estate, there's no standard, straightforward way to find out which online services the deceased subscribed to, nor to arrange for an appropriate transfer of the account and its data to the next of kin. Finally, in the case of accounts that should remain online after the owner has died, there is the question of how to memorialise the account: for instance, how to keep a Facebook account available for viewing by friends and relatives, but without having it generate potentially upsetting "Why don't you poke so-and-so?" messages.

I created this website, rodfos.org, in order for myself and others in the online community to have a place to discuss concerns such as these, to learn more about them, and to work towards solutions. If you work for a company that provides online services, or if you are a user of such services yourself, I would welcome your contributions to this website, which I hope will result in a code of conduct and a technical protocol that may be easily adopted by large numbers of online services for the benefit of their users and their users' friends and family.

Thank you in advance,