Print this page

Who owns you when you're dead?

In the early 2010s a number of products suddenly appeared to address your concern over your posthumous identity. For instance, the If I Die app takes care of your final status update. (The name of the app seems rather optimistic - shouldn't it really be "When I die"?) Google formalized a kind of digital "Will" you can create for how your Google identity assets are dealt with when you depart (Oremus 2013). Facebook is a bit more complex, and I haven't kept up with their protocols. See Strickland (n.d.) for some fairly recent guidelines to controlling what happens to your online presence after death. No doubt this will continue to evolve with the major social media platforms. I don't keep up with it.

If you are interested in the legal arguments around this, and particularly using traditional property law and torts as a method of discouraging abuse, you may want to read through Chu 2015. In her concluding summary she suggests that extending existing invasion of privacy tort to include posthumous privacy is recommended since "a legislative approach would take too long." But surely entirely new legislation is ultimately what will be needed, if people care about what happens not just to their privacy but to the integrity of their identities after they are dead.

As online activity becomes a greater part of everyday life, much more of the information collected online can be extremely personal. Despite this, very few young adults have a will dictating what should be done with all the personal information collected online during their life. In the absence of testamentary intent, a deceased individual’s posthumous right to privacy is tenuous under current law. Because contract law and property law ineffectively protect a deceased individual’s online privacy rights, extending the invasion of privacy tort posthumously is the best way to protect an individual’s privacy rights after death. Utilizing common law would be most effective because a legislative approach would take too long. Also, common law and state legislatures already recognize posthumous dignitary interests. Since dignity and privacy are closely intertwined and digital assets tend to elicit much more personal information than a dead body, extending the tort posthumously is necessary to protect these rights. (Chu 2015)

Artificial Reanimation

The LivesOn app was in development in 2013. It proposed to actually keep up your tweeting for you after you're gone. Using AI to analyze your tweeting tendencies it would (or would have, since it doesn't seem like it has gone anywhere, at least not under that name) continued your profile's perspective on new happenings and world events after you are no longer alive. Of course, this would ultimately be a dead you too, frozen in whatever attitudes you had arrived at before you passed away IRL, and unable to learn or change from the new events "you" would be commenting on. Maybe in the future, software will analyze all of our interactions throughout life, and when our physical bodies die, the profiles that we now think of as ourselves will continue online, even evolving, as we might have done had we lived ...

Back in 2011, Adam Ostrow presented a brief Ted Talk on what happens to your personality after your body dies. Some of it may still be relevant or thought provoking today.

So Grandma passes away, and without missing a beat a hologram is installed in her favourite chair, making the same predictable remarks she was making for the last 10 years of her life.

But why stop there? Why not have her develop some new interests for a change, look after her great-grandchildren and tell them stories about the old days, tell them what a genius Kanye is, while we go out and party and the hologram babysits, and so forth? In the future, maybe no one will definitively die - as an image anyway; we may all be sentenced to eternal life as virtual identities, digital media and identity-mimicking algorithms. In 2023, a company is claiming it will make this kind of technology available shortly, using AI. Futurism magazine reported on this venture sarcastically, concluding "You know, because digital avatars of lost loved ones speaking by way of bots — bots that in turn are trained on limited, context-less data — is exactly how to preserve their humanity" (Harrison 2023). Evidently, though, someone thinks there will be a market for this.

My mother died in 2023. We had said everything we needed to say to each other, but I still have things come into my head on a daily basis that I would like to share with her. But I don't seem to have the slightest interest in a virtual version of her that I could talk to the way I talked to my mom. On some level, I just don't feel it would be real. My mother was not just a collection of data; she was a body, a being - and a growing, changing creature right until she died. Now she doesn't exist. I've no desire for a parasocial and hyperreal continuation of the relationship I had with her.

Can one own one's own identity? Can one really control it? Many people worry about the problem of identity theft today. But they're thinking primarily about someone who steals and uses your credit cards or perhaps your name or social insurance number for some form of profitable fraud. In the future, though, there may be forms of identity theft we can only dream, or have nightmares, about today. Deepfakes and AI simulations of the dead are the tip of this iceberg.

Do we need new legislation to cover identity rights for the dead - and maybe even for the living?