I don't think privacy is a new problem. When my dad died, he left piles of personal pen-and-paper letters from his former wife and girlfriends that they probably would have preferred strangers didn't read. He was a therapist and also left confidential client information containing, for instance, interviews with child sex abuse victims for court cases.
This is a problem in general when you trust something to someone to keep confidential. When they die, it becomes part of their estate and it's not confidential anymore. I don't see why data stored in online services should be any different from data stored on your computer in your house. With the cloud, it's sometimes not clear where it's being stored anyway.
The problem as a whole isn't new, but it's ramped up to a new level and applied more broadly. If your estate doesn't have provisions for handling your Facebook account in it, it will get left up on the Interwebs. And some of the distant friends who forget because of old age or were so distant they never really knew the person past away will continue to write happy birthday wishes, year after year. Those wishes will end up being seen by people directly affected by the death, year after year. It's not a desirable experience. I think the big challenge here is at the intersection of how we'd like the privacy of data to change on passing for data that was previously semi-public or widely shared which is new (In some sense the data is out there and can't be changed but platforms often govern how we experience the interactions around it). The problem you describe is kind of the opposite -- how does confidential data stay confidential. The other direction is sort of new, and isn't as much a data/information problem as an interaction one.
I don't understand this desire to make the Internet a "Safe Space" which doesn't offend anyone. The Internet is inherently "unsafe". If you can't stomach the thought of someone wishing a happy birthday to a dead dude, why not just let them know that the person is deceased?
As for confidential data, it should be encrypted at rest, so that the decryption key disappears along with the deceased. No estate or court order can decrypt that data.
>As for confidential data, it should be encrypted at rest, so that the decryption key disappears along with the deceased.
That is not an answer solution to many issues. For example, I am an attorney and sole practitioner, if I were to die unexpectedly my clients would be entitled to get their case files, confidential/privileged/work product documentation can't just disappear upon my death and as others have suggested my estate could be liable for that just as likely as my estate could be liable for the same documents being release to any 3rd party. Separate and apart from liability I could simply prejudice my clients case in the instance of litigation either due loss of documentation or disclosure of the same to 3rd parties.
And these are not just hypotheticals, I worked in an office building where another attorney died unexpectedly of a heart attacker while driving, and there was no real procedure in place, simply many in the building rallied and took the case files and helped his clients, but who knows what documentation was lost and never recovered, alternatively there was very likely all kinds of breaches of professional responsibility and liability exposure, despite the realities of the legal community rallying and doing their best in a bad situation.
>As for confidential data, it should be encrypted at rest, so that the decryption key disappears along with the deceased.
> That is not an answer solution to many issues.
What happens to memory in our brain when we die? What about the things that only we know and never tell anyone else?
Isn't that a problem? Should we make an attempt to recover a person's memories from their corpse?
We've been dealing with irrevocable losses upon death ever since humans started doing other things besides eating and reproducing. Our online passwords and porn stashes are, generally, just another item on the list of things that die with us.
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My aunt, who was very much like a foster mother to me, died this year after spending 4 months in a comatose/vegetative state. Before that she had suffered a stroke which rendered her unable to write anything. So for the last couple years of her life, she was unable to leave behind her thoughts (I deeply regret not helping her use her iPad for that), and not even able to tell her family anything in the last few months, despite being able to see us and hear us.
We don't even have any recent pictures of her, let alone videos. I'm thinking of contacting her phone company and requesting if they could provide us with a recording from a random call, just so we can listen to her voice, but I doubt they will oblige.
I don't think what you're responding to is a desire to create a "safe space", but is actually pointing out a bad user experience. If an unintended consequence of your product is that it reminds users of deceased friends and relatives at inopportune times or in uncomfortable ways, I think it's worth exploring solutions to that.
I mean Facebook should treat the account as part of the estate, to be controlled by whoever controls the estate. If you're the heir of all their miscellaneous property, that would mean you get to prove that to Facebook and they hand over the account to you.
Maybe Facebook doesn't want to deal with the messy papers and signatures involved in that.
Controlled doesn't mean "I am writing as Grandpa" but rather "I am writing on behalf of Grandpa."
Part of what needs to be addressed is "is what I write and what I control online part of my _identity_ or part of my _intellectual property_?"
No, a person inheriting the estate doesn't have the right to pretend to be Grandpa and collect social security checks or defraud people based on that identity.
Yes, a person inheriting the estate does have the right to take the collected poetry and essays that Grandpa wrote and publishing it. ... even if they are published on Facebook.
Are Facebook, Twitter, Github etc... in the first category or the second category?
Microsoft outlook has a neat feature to "send on behalf of" (account settings, delegate access). Such an approach would be something to consider for an online presence to distinguish who is doing the sending - the deceased or the estate.
> You are essentially advocating that you should be able to inherit the identity of a person
Just because eg the person's wallet is now technical property of the estate, doesn't mean the identity information contained within (driver's license, credit cards, etc) now acts as a form of identity inheritance or transferal. That's not how estates work legally.
The article states, for example, "... even where it feels right to turn over private messages to family members, laws may prevent us from doing so. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Stored Communications Act, for instance, prevent us from relying upon family consent to disclose the contents of a person’s communications."
So simply handing over the account isn't a possibility, they'd have to remove the nonpublic communications first.
Which is one of the reasons I am a strong advocate for Data Privacy laws.
Today most nations including the US already have laws around Medical Records, maybe your father passed before these laws where in place but if his therapist records became "part of the estate" and you released them publicly you likely would be in violation of more than a few federal laws, and if your father stored those records improperly (which based on your description of the records that is likely) he would have also been in violation of Medical Records law. I going to assume his practice predated these laws, but situations like what you described are one of the reasons these laws were created in the first place. Simply because my Doctor dies does not mean my medical information is now public.
So no privacy is not a new problem, but it is a problem people need to take more seriously, not take the position you seem to have here which is "well it is always been an issue so lets not worry about it"
How is this different from a safety deposit that was owned by a now deceased person? Surely, the same existing laws should apply to physical objects and digital objects.
> When they die, it becomes part of their estate and it's not confidential anymore.
IANAL, but I don't think the law works this way. If you reveal any of that confidential information, you would be as liable to getting sued for breach of confidentiality as your father was. I believe this will be one of those cases where ignorance of the law will not protect you, beause it is common knowledge that what happened between your dad and his clients is confidential information.
Given that statute affecting everyday life has grown to a scale that nobody, not even lawyers or even judges, can study and apply it consistently; it's hard to say how anyone could be expected to apply it. The great majority of laws on the books are not intuitive either.
Honestly I end up wondering how the legal system functions at all.
They are prioritizing the wishes of the dead over those of the living.
If the wife wants to friend the dead husband, I don't think it's so important "what he would have wanted."
They should prioritize the wishes of the next of kin, or executrix of his will, or whomever our traditions and legal system has figured out can make this decision.
We as a society came to these practices over many generations. They exist for a reason, and the way this is phrased, it seems Facebook is putting themselves in the position of reinventing the wheel for whatever reasons they have. Which may or may not be in the interests of the survivors of the deceased.
Paradoxically, respecting the wishes of the dead is more about empowering the living. If there are no such guarantees then people alive will take actions to enforce their wishes past their death.
In the context of Wills, that would mean more people would transfer their estate before their death. In the context of Facebook, it would mean some people may delete certain data (or in some cases delete their entire account) if they don't want the data discovered after they die.
The initial property division is done by a will because it is the only neutral way to decide who is to divide up an estate and how they are supposed to do it. If Bob leaves his boat to his daughter Charlotte instead of his son David, that is much cleaner than having David and Charlotte fighting over it.
After the estate is settled, the heirs are free to do whatever they want with their inherited property. If Charlotte didn't really care for the boat but David really wanted it, she is free to sell it to him or gift it outright. Or she can sell it to a third party. Charlotte shouldn't feel guilty or pressured by a dead man to enjoy the boat.
You are just choosing a precise meaning for "wishes" and hammering on that.
Look at the context and consider a scenario where a will has a statement that Facebook should be deleted (or frozen or whatever). The comment I replied to implies the statement shouldn't matter if someone living wants something else.
My meaning was something like the whole concept of a will is about respecting and recognizing the priorities expressed by the dead.
I don't disagree with what you say about what people do with things they inherit, but you are imputing an awful lot of meaning to make that a contradiction of my sentence that I posted above.
What if a will states that the deceased wants to be cremated with no funeral, wake nor any other ceremony? The wishes of the executor/executrix or next of kin to have a memorial service would likely trump that. I think someone's Facebook account is closer to this scenario than to a bank account, house, vehicle, or other property.
I'm sorry if I misconstrued your use of the word wishes. I feel that the whole concept of a will is the best solution that we as a society have found for determining what to do with a person's possessions when they die. The dead can't expect their priorities to be acted upon without question since it is the living who have to deal with the consequences of those priorities.
Throwaway, the poster literally acknowledged will in their post - they suggested the will's executor should be the legal executor of their online legacy just as they are responsible for the physical estate.
Yes the OP mentioned a Will, but misunderstands the purpose of the Will supported by:
>If the wife wants to friend the dead husband, I don't think it's so important "what he would have wanted."
A Will doesn't mean ignore the husbands wishes in favor of the wife/heirs, it means who ever is executor, wife or not, must comply with what the husband dictates.
His statements contradict though. "If the wife wants to friend the dead husband, I don't think it's so important 'what he would have wanted.'" That goes completely against the idea of a will, which is exactly to do what he would have wanted.
Perhaps they meant to make a distinction between the inherently debatable "what he would have wanted" and "what we actually have a written statement of him wanting"?
The Facebook paper on this topic ("Legacy Contact: Designing and implementing stewardship at Facebook") is one of my favorites from their publications repo. Not highly-technical, but relatively detailed as it explores the human side of the design tradeoffs needed to accommodate an unavoidably difficult and varied situation:
Despite appearances, Facebook is not impartial to this question whatsoever. They would profit greatly from keeping dead people's profiles on their site.
Loved ones and friends still respond strongly to the presence of a dead person. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if friends of dead people incur more engagement than people when they were alive (sadly).
They need to establish a policy for 3 or 4 or 5 generations from now. Like the us government allowing old census data but not new.
As a genealogy fan with known roots spanning centuries, at some point there no longer is any connection or feeling to a ggggf or gggg aunt.
I absolutely CRAVE to learn what life was like for my family. Why did one uncle hunt and send birds eggs overseas? Or one gggggm rode horseback to come to aid revolutionary soldiers? What battle?
Facebook probably will just be an archive 120 years from now. But a extreme long term policy will assist future genealogists. Something like "after 80 years past the death, all fb related data is available." after 25 years its available to direct line descendants.
> Facebook probably will just be an archive 120 years from now. But a extreme long term policy will assist future genealogists. Something like "after 80 years past the death, all fb related data is available." after 25 years its available to direct line descendants.
This sounds highly troubling to me. Imagine being persecuted in your life because some ggggm whom you never knew about was an extremist (racist and what not - let your imagination run wild on how despicable that person was during their time). Your craving to learn about your family decades or centuries ago must not become an overriding factor for the entire society to abide by. The "right to be forgotten" [1], though not perfect, has a lot of value for humans.
On Facebook specifically, it is a highly buggy platform. Even as of yesterday, I couldn't get search to find recent content that I knew was there. I had to resort to other (slower and cumbersome) ways of finding it. This has been a long standing problem (several years). Content discovery in Facebook is terrible, and hence assuming Facebook to be the custodian of one's life experiences is a very, very poor choice, in my observation. Facebook is not the platform for archival!
Shouldn't we instead strive for the "right" not to be judged by the actions of our ancestors?
I'm sure nobody actively condones persecution of people in revenge for what their ancestors did. But if we sweep anything n generations back under the carpet, aren't we implying that anything less than n generations back is fair game for vendettas?
While human nature can excuse some lasting response to lived experience, I think there's a wider gap to bridge before ethics allows us to generalize and map past crimes to present perpetrators.
> This sounds highly troubling to me. Imagine being persecuted in your life because some ggggm whom you never knew about was an extremist (racist and what not - let your imagination run wild on how despicable that person was during their time). Your craving to learn about your family decades or centuries ago must not become an overriding factor for the entire society to abide by. The "right to be forgotten" [1], though not perfect, has a lot of value for humans.
That's a really great point. I wonder though - if the archive is this thorough and the attitude for which the relative is now being persecuted was widespread at the time, won't the archive be able to prove the counterpoint that the hypothetical ggggm was similar to most other people?
The answer is clear: the data should be monitized in a way that best minimizes the potential creation of social or political sentiment to create roadblocks which may diminish future monitization of similar data.
Why they don't just ask it while the account owner is still alive? There should be some settings for this.
Some people might also pay for such a service (keep my account for 100 years for $99).
They do allow users to indicate their preferences.
"Memorialization is our default action, but we know that some people might not want their account preserved this way. They might prefer that we delete their profile. Recognizing this, we give people a way to let us know they want their account permanently deleted when they die. We may also delete profiles when the next of kin tells us that the deceased loved one would have preferred that we delete the account rather than memorialize it.
Other people might want a friend or family member to be able to manage their profile as a memorial site after their death. That’s why in 2015, we created the option for people to choose a legacy contact. A legacy contact is a family member or friend who can manage certain features on your account if you pass away, such as changing your profile picture, accepting friend requests or adding a pinned post to the top of your profile. They can also elect to delete your account."
Maybe it should become part of the estate, but I don't know enough about that to say how. If it's part of a will then honor that, otherwise it the next of kin or whatever who decides what to do with it (in a limited fashion that prevents identity theft - maybe freeze it or delete it being the only options).
I include as much information as I can in my "What to do if I die" documentation that my wife has. But much of the stuff that has 2FA is also paid, so it falls under the category of, "Just cancel my credit card, and the accounts will disappear on their own."
It is a list of the various accounts I have that would need action. Mostly, I instruct her to decide for herself what she wants to do with my web sites and email addresses, but I give her enough info to gain access to it all, and recommend which accounts should be switched to her credit card instead of mine (Netflix, for example.) It doesn't list everything -- this HN account for example, is not mentioned, and would just go silent.
I also list out who needs to be informed -- who to contact directly by phone, who to email.
It isn't intended to be a will - it is more a list of the little details of my life that are not part of our shared existence, that would probably be forgotten in the turmoil, so I thought of them ahead of time.
I look at it a few times a year and keep it up to date. And I hope it is a wasted effort.
A few years ago my brother died, unexpectedly, in his thirties, in a neighbour country. He travelled a lot and had friends all over the planet. We didn't know most of them. Their email adresses were probably in his gmail account, so we thought to get it assigned to us.
Procedure is in this page: https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?h...
. The problem: It asks for a court order in the united states. No idea why the courts are even involved in this case, it seems like a basic civic issue, but the US seems to do a lot by court. Or not, I don't actually know.
So here we are, in grief, far from home, burial in a week, horrible mess to sort out, and google wants some legal papers from some court half the planet away, in a completely alien legal system where I even don't know what my basic rights are. Even if google has local presence in all of the countrys involved. No chance to fix that in a week.
I hope like hell we found most of his important friends.
Even so, if any googler happens to read this: Please fix that. I know you cant' give access to random strangers, but there's got to be a better way, involving at least the local legal system.
To put it bluntly: fuck the living. It's impossible to please every living relative and close friend.
The solution with Facebook is simple: if you don't want to have a deceased person showing up on your feed, unfriend them and add them to your block list. Assuming Facebook is well-designed, blocking someone should prevent them from ever showing up in your feed, even if others are tagging them in photos or posting to their wall. As for your being aware that "the profile is still there and other people are interacting with it", get over it. It's not your place to dictate how others should deal with the death. You have the choice to not look; so don't look if you don't want to. Lack of self-control to not check back every month to see what other people are doing is not a valid reason to nuke the profile from orbit.
Speaking to the internet at large: the only way to mandate how companies must respond to news of a death would require tying every single page load on the internet to an official government ID. Nobody wants to provide their government ID to ThePirateBay and PornHub just so that their entire online identity can uniformly vanish upon death.
How many people burn their photo albums when a loved one dies, in order to remove all traces of that person? Nobody. Why should the digital equivalent be any different? More simply, why should an online presence be terminated? Just... "why?". I suspect every attempted answer to that question is born of self-centred excuses that have no merit; ie: based on "I" or "me" - "I don't want to be reminded", "It pains me to see", etc.
tldr; The whole think stinks of "Won't somebody think of the children?!", but instead it's "Won't somebody think of me me me me me?!". The level of absurdity seems equivalent to me.
I've got a deadman switch with my password manager. A week after I don't respond, my trusted friend has instructions to go in and delete everything. Also to take a power drill to my laptops and home NAS.
It all becomes info out of context, photos and conversations between people whose confidence I would keep in life. Has value to me, but it should all be burnt when I go.
> Depending on the circumstances of a person’s death, those online reminders can be overwhelming. A mother who loses her daughter to domestic violence may feel sick when she looks online and sees photos of her daughter’s wedding day
> When people come to Facebook after suffering a loss, we want them to feel comfort, not pain,
> The family of a young hairdresser murdered in a savage attack by her ex-boyfriend have repeatedly appealed to Facebook to remove photographs of the pair together.
> Nine images of Hollie Gazzard, 20, who was stabbed 14 times by Asher Maslin in February last year, are still visible online.
Online doesn't really make anything much different. When a loved one dies, you grieve, and eventually come to terms with it and move on. You get bills, letters, Christmas cards, junk mail, etc. for a while after the person is gone. Charities are the worst. I still get letters from various charties, addressed to my mother who has been dead for nine years.
Facebook doesn't really change things, much as they might like to believe that people's lives hinge on their service.
That seems an overly simplistic way to look at things. Everything about computation isn't "much different" since it's literally built on a system of switches and logic gates. It's the scalability and speed that makes the difference, I mean, that's arguably why Facebook.com became a thing even though "face books" at Harvard have existed for years/decades [0].
In the case of death, there's the "new" issue that someone's Facebook account is basically an instantly-worldwide-accessible and permanent gravesite when they die. In the case of sudden death, there's a real issue of what that person would want on what's become an ad-hoc memorial site for perpetuity. And because it's a web service, there's the technical issue of access control, along with all the legal issues that have been around since the pre-Internet days.
A dead coworker's Facebook profile was hijacked, started spamming. It was very distressing.
Minimally:
Subscribe to the SSA Death Registry (or local equivalent), integrate the data. Set a flag in (potentially) matching profile(s). Put account into some kind of "might be dead" probationary state, for further adjudication.
Having worked on both medical and voter registration records, this is normal activity. Social media, email hosts, etc, should do the same.
Okay, this is going to sound stupid. May be someone would like to receive a "Merry Xmas and happy new year" or "Happy b'day" message from their lost loved ones. FB should give me an option to do that before i die. May be a checkbox somewhere in the settings.
[ ] send wishes automatically if inactive for 1 year
I totally agree, but based on the reaction to this guys christmas cards after he died [1] this idea is not received well (which i dont understand). You are thinking about loved ones in the future by your request. I doube FB would go for it.
This is a very important topic, in fact, I was almost making a service that would somehow help people share their online identities/access to their next of kin if such incident should occur.
Unfortunately, the feedbacks wasn't so good, I had to shut it down.
I don't think any SINGLE social media company can solve this.
Simple. Express in your will that you wish your social media account credentials to be posted to 4chan, or whatever the equivalent of the day is, with instructions to 'have at it, jerks'.
That way, your online identity gets to be like Jim Morrison's grave.
The story at the beginning is so incredibly sad. We need to connect as much as we can while we're alive. Not through facebook. So that we have minimal/no regrets once its too late.
why not provide a tool like google to self-destruct profile if not logged in within a time frame ? Why is facebook taking the pain of resolving conflicts and becoming a mediator and judge etc ? Instead of giving the profile owners with tools to control what should happen in case of death or inactivity for a long period (like google?) ?
Facebook does provide these very tools. In settings, you can appoint a legacy contact and/or you can state what you want to happen to your profile when you die.
Plenty of people have left important and informative publicly posted content, commonly linked to by others. Automatically removing those from the net would be a massive disservice to the deceased, eliminating the fruit of their work & passions and their voice from history.
This is a problem in general when you trust something to someone to keep confidential. When they die, it becomes part of their estate and it's not confidential anymore. I don't see why data stored in online services should be any different from data stored on your computer in your house. With the cloud, it's sometimes not clear where it's being stored anyway.