All the Ghosts in the Machine:
The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data
At the 2019 House of Beautiful Business gathering in Lisbon, the writer Anand Giridharadas was reflecting on our peculiar expectation that social media companies lead transformational societal reform. It was unwise, he remarked, to outsource hen protection to foxes.
This resonated with me not only as the owner of chickens, but as a critic of the role of big technology companies in managing the data of the deceased. In the early days of social media, that management involved a relatively black-and-white decision: one account/one user, user has died, delete. Now, we expect social media to be new-style funeral directors, who furnish people’s digital remains with appropriate final resting places on their sites and who sensitively shepherd mourners through their ongoing social encounters with the digital dead.
In November 2019, Twitter announced an imminent cull of inactive accounts. Readers of the fine print would have known that the site always had an inactive-account policy, perhaps without realizing that it also amounted to a delayed delete-upon-death mechanism. At news of the cull, bereaved people cried out, panicked that accounts they cherished would disappear forever. Within 24 hours Twitter backtracked, promising to investigate a memorialization process like its Silicon Valley colleagues. Facebook, for example, has memorialized profiles ever since the massacre at Virginia Tech, when mourners begged the site to abandon its own delete-upon-death policy. Instagram features memorialization now too.
While some could care less about the preservation of someone’s social media after death, others are utterly outraged at its disappearance. One admirer of the late English journalist Deborah Orr called the deletion of her Twitter profile a ‘violent act’, like a murder. My own and others’ research clearly shows that many bereaved people deeply value posthumously persistent social media, which helps them continue bonds with those they’ve lost. Social media companies who are guided by this research should, in some ways, be lauded for their awareness and for attempting to minimize users’ pain.
However, should big technology companies be tackling the tricky business of calibrating our grief experience, attempting the responsiveness of a grief counsellor or psychologist? Should they be determining the ‘better ways’ to honor loved ones, as a Facebook press release for the April 2019 rollout of new memorialization features put it? The thing is, the nature and course of grief vary spectacularly over time and between individuals. No one, much less a social media company, has the right – or the data – to determine what is right for an individual in their grief.
If social media sites continue to memorialize accounts, they could respond to the idiosyncratic nature of grief by being less paternalistic and offering users more individualized control over their interaction with and exposure to those accounts. Birthday reminders for the deceased on Facebook are not universally painful, for example; they may be welcome to one user and horrifying to another. Despite protestations I’ve heard, providing more options should not be too high a design hurdle to clear.
But should memorialization be the default? As we struggle to cool the world’s data centers, the rapidly mounting data of the deceased turn up the heat. One recent study predicted 4.9 billion dead digital bodies on Facebook by 2100. Of course, as the tipping point is approached, Facebook will likely have moved on to greener pastures, unless they work out how to better monetize the data of the dear departed. After all, they never set out to be a digital cemetery, and what moral obligation do they really have to maintain one, especially when it hurts the bottom line?
When someone dies and Twitter deletes their account, or their next of kin removes their Facebook profile, I suspect that our discomfiture is multifaceted. We may feel a fresh grief, like a second loss, when the digital reflection of the physical person vanishes. But we also realise what else we’ve lost. At such moments of data disappearance, it hits us – how much control and ownership we’ve lost, not just over our own data, but over our memories of others. We are disturbed not just because something precious has been taken, but because we gave control of it away, a long time ago.
When we feel anxious about losing our highly centralized digital memories, we look to the fox, saying, “Please, look after my hens well, so that I always know where to find them.’ One day, the fox might say, ‘That’s not a good job for me. Here’s a “download archive” link valid for a limited time.’ Until that point, we should be careful how much responsibility we give him.
Professor Elaine Kasket is a London-based Counselling Psychologist, cyberpsychologist, and the author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data.
