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Your presence online after you die

stridemat

stridemat

Moderator
Original poster
Staff member
Apr 2, 2008
11,381
899
UK
A rather macabre subject but what should happen to you online presence after you die.

The death of a close, elderly relative can often mean a sombre weekend or two going through old things, sorting through photographs, donating old clothes to charity.

But in an age when so much of our lives are online, little thought has been given to how we handle a person's digital world when they are no longer with us.
Click to expand...

I joined Facebook it my late teens, before that I had MySpace. What happens if I was just to up and die?

As a person dies, should their online presence end too? What should happen to all that personal information?
Click to expand...

Come to think of it I wonder how many MR members registered and are no longer with us. Statistically a rather large number.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11900774
 
Meh, the way I see it is this ...

remember the trees
remember the grass
remember me
the pain in the ass.

Let me die in peace, you people take care of the rest.
 
I remember reading about a service that will make sure all your internet accounts are closed properly.
 
Has anyone ever watched "Serial Experiments Lain"? Nobody dies, we simply shed our physical embodiments and live on inside the "Wire"...
 
Your information still sits on a drive somewhere. The fact that you die doesn't effect the fact that your online information lives. Sort of like a non-sentient-Matrix type of a thing.
 
I have paintings of my great-great grandparents, pictures of my grandparents, video/audio of my parents. When I die, my kids will have all of the above of me, as well as online data.

Many people leave behind traces of themselves. Few of us will have traces of ourselves present in 100, much less a thousand years from now.

As said before, I won't care...I'll be fertilizer.
 
I see it two ways. If I were to die at an old age of natural causes I would see my online videos as kind of a nice and fun way to remember me, along with coping with my death. But if I were to die tragically in a car accident tomorrow I think it would be a painful reminder to my family that I died at a young age and had the world ahead of me.
 
what if the cloud suddenly deletes everyone's data then after the IT revolution with people living digital lives, there really won't be much of a trace of anyone left then. kind of like you lived a pointless life
 
Pretty much everyone has some sort of online presence, so even if your information remains online forever after at least it's going to be the same for everyone else :D
 
I have given my friends permission to change my statuses to "is dead" or anything else funny that they feel like doing.:p

Also, I hope some of the old names that I hardly remember from around here are not passed on.
 
A friend of mine died a little over a year ago now aged just 22. His Facebook page is still there and is more actively posted on than most I know. Whenever people do something that reminds them of him they write him a message.

As coarse as the internet can be sometimes, a Facebook page can remain as a faithful reminder of a person in life and I'm sure that the things written give comfort to friends and family. There are curious, tasteless online shrine type sites like gonetoosoon that are pretty foul, but I think that this is a rare example of a Facebook page with a noble and selfless purpose.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Has your friends Facebook page been memorialised?
 
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