What happens online when you die?

A digital executor who can help you organize a digital will and manage any aspects of your digital self you want to keep alive after your death.

When choosing a digital executor, ask yourself:

• Who knows your true online self? Consider how much your friends and family know about what you do and who you are online. Who do you want sifting through your online profiles?
• Who do you trust? You must choose a person you trust completely to execute your digital estate. Look for someone who will respect and follow your exact wishes.
• Who’s capable of using these platforms? Your digital executor should be someone who knows how to use your social media platforms and is likely to outlive you.

Provide your digital executor with a list of all your accounts, including user names and passwords for each. In many cases, social media and email providers won’t allow anybody to access your accounts after you die unless they have your password.

To avoid the old way of notifying friends and family about your death by phone, your digital executor can use your profiles to notify your online communities.

It’s like an overzealous interview question, but where do you see yourself 100 years from now? Our digital selves may live online in ways that are impossible to imagine.

In a recent TED Talk, Adam Ostrow raises questions for our future digital selves. He suggests the possibility to use our accumulated data to create increasingly lifelike versions of ourselves.

Even if it’s possible, would you want a machine-generated version of yourself to live on after you die?

Think a robotic version of yourself is far-fetched? Think again: Soon, you’ll be able to download your digital self to a robot or generate a hologram based on the information you contribute about yourself online.

Mind files are the closest thing we have to this idea so far. These files allow you to upload biographical pictures, videos and documents to a digital archive that’s preserved for future generations. Through geomapping and timelines, you store a comprehensive file about your life down to the places you’ve been and the people you’ve met. Makes you think twice about checking in at your favorite bar on Facebook, huh?

From there, you can create a computer-based avatar that accesses and “learns” from the attitudes, values, mannerisms and beliefs in your mind file. Your avatar then connects with others who have stored their mind files, interacting with them and responding as you would.

One company accepting mind files today is Life Naut. A free account offers a secure space to store your life experiences — plus you can back up your information offsite. By storing your mind file, you’re able to participate in long-term computer science research, which will continue to explore the ways technology can extend life.

What we leave behind

What does your digital profile say about you?

Digital cultural heritage

There’s also the question of how others should use the information you leave. In the past, we preserved and studied documents, letters, photos and artifacts to learn more about our ancestors — and in turn ourselves.

Today, so much information about us is stored digitally in vivid detail. Consider that as of June 2018, more than 2 billion people are on Facebook. That’s a staggering number, translating to an enormous amount of information shared daily.

But how important is this information? How much more of it will there be in 10 years? And how will Facebook and our families even begin to manage this digital content?

Historians and Internet archaeologists of the future will be faced with a daunting task: Sorting through near-infinite reams of human-created data. There will be more information available about the humblest 21st-century person’s life than of any historical figure of the past. It’s comforting, in a way, to think of our lives, actions and personalities being recorded so accurately. But given the sheer amount of data and people, it’s also very humbling.

Forgetting gracefully

None of us are meant to live forever. Maybe we should ask ourselves whether it’s necessary to preserve our digital selves just as they are today. Rather than continuing long after we’re dead, perhaps our digital selves should be allowed fade out like our memories.

In his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggests a mechanism that allows us to digitally forget gracefully. Files would come with expiration dates, simply vanishing after a specific time. Data would “digitally rust” without our conscious effort to preserve it.

Today, several companies are taking up these ideas. For instance, the German company XPire allows you to set up images, like those you upload to Facebook, to self-destruct. Businesses like XPire would help keep the Internet from filling with more data from the dead than from the living. And if your family and friends decided they’d rather memorialize you online, they could keep the rust off your files.

Digital death is unfamiliar, but it doesn’t mean you should avoid thinking about what you’d like to happen to your online self after you die. Start by considering what you’d leave behind if you died tomorrow. Think about how the world would see you through your digital profiles, and what legacy you’d rather leave behind. With care, you can turn all of your blog posts and status updates into something truly meaningful.