Hi, I'm HIMANK NAGPAL !

I had always avoided going to one particular Facebook profile for the past three years until recently. It was of my close relatives who had passed away then. While I had always assumed that his profile would be dormant and be “deactivated” soon enough after his demise, I often saw active yet sporadic content being posted by his immediate family members and his friends in his remembrance. My feelings towards those events oscillated from disbelief to denial to a hope that it was an ephemeral technical flaw in the social media corporation’s algorithms before finally coming to terms with the feeling of acceptance and peace. Now, I know that it’s time to move on. As George Eliot said “Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them”, I have come to accept the fact that different people choose different ways of remembrance of the deceased and that his immediate family members have embraced such a way to do so.

 

I have always considered death and its concerning rituals as sacred and have always believed that mourning by the bereaved must happen with sincerity. The privacy of the bereaved must be respected without fail. While the motives of the Mongols must have been different but Genghis Khan’s death was kept so secret that his funeral procession killed anyone who came in its way. No matter what the motives, death can complicate the matters for the bereaved. Hence, death has been a private affair since times immemorial. Earlier my imagery regarding the inheritance and distribution of assets had been limited to that of tangible assets like real estate and various chattels such as cars, furniture, personal property and intangible assets like financial accounts.

 

I had earlier softly regarded social media posts as an ersatz way to mourn. However, no matter how disparate personal opinions regarding demise and grief may be, I think that addressing the elephant in the room that “ Who has the access to our digital belongings and what happens to our digital assets – accounts, files, crypto currency and so on when we pass away? “ is the need of the hour. Man’s possessions become an extension of the self. He uses those to signal to himself and to others, his identity. While man’s time on earth is limited, he often yearns for his legacy to be passed on and that he will be remembered long after he’s gone. His essence lives on in what he made or owned. And mostly, the artifacts are inherited by the kin or other nominees. Same should be the case with the digital assets of a person. However, this should be kept in mind as per the wishes of the person in question. If he had been able to undertake digital estate planning, then his wishes should be respected and his nominees should get all that he asked for. If he had explicitly wished for deletion of his digital footprints, then it simplifies a lot of matters. However, If he hadn’t been able to do that, then a larger say in these matters should be provided to his immediate kin or people who had been closest to him while he was alive (“Data heirs” ). The remaining yet minor fraction of decision making must be shared between the service providers and the authorities. This is because while for them, a person might have been just a number, user ID or a case study, but for the kin, their existence was real. Hence, these parties must adopt the motto of “people first” and should ethically honor the dead.

 

I firmly believe that anything which has any value, whether monetary or emotional, short term or long term, should be saved as per the wishes of first, the concerned person if he got the opportunity of digital estate planning before his demise and then, that of his immediate kin. First, there must be provision for the easy inheritance of crypto currencies as they are here to stay. Second, for personal possessions here, while we can understand that “endowment effect” might be at play here, we need to empathize with the bereaved who might have been part of the deceased’s digital existence also. Hence, anything that they wish to be a part of the deceased’s digital afterlife should be allowed the provision of being saved and inherited. Also, in the historical context, sometimes the lack of data prevents us from knowing exactly about the “important” events, their timelines and background of important events. This can be prevented in the future for the sake of Mankind’s knowledge. With the salvation of the people’s data from now onwards, the fuzziness of history can be ironed out for the coming generations.

 

Loss is personal at the bare minimum. Thus, we need more humane laws and user policies. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, but there are healthy ways to deal with the grieving process. Also, it takes time- it can’t be hurried or at the whims of governments and corporations. Hence, it becomes imperative to allow for a subjective evaluation of what has to be stored and for how long. Here, the roles of service providers become manifold and significant. They range from simplifying the problems of the interface and storage design, to privacy and ownership issues to playing an active role in formulating the guidelines and laws for easy digi-inheritance. While it might be true that due to the varied nature of countries, cultures, governments, service providers and families and their needs and expectations, it might be troublesome to reach a consensus as of now. So for now, let all the parties mutually formulate guidelines and/or directives and let the best practices emerge before anything is etched in stone and a modern age proverbial “Book of the Dead (for digital afterlife)” emerges. Also the service providers should make provisions to allow the bereaved a larger say in the proceedings. Simultaneously, we should also commend the actions of the service providers as well, as they are also now coping with these new age issues, learning and becoming better in such sensitive matters.

 

We can see that the self has become irreversibly extended into technology, quite literally, with the service providers acting as memory prosthetics. We should strive towards saving anything that is of any value to honor the dead’s legacy. The need of the hour is for all the governments, legal industry, IT industry and other stakeholders to come together to formulate uniform yet non-infringing guidelines for now and later, laws in the world with country-specific amendments ( if required ) pertaining to their digital legacies and bequeathing their digital assets to the next of kin. But they should let the guiding principle be the same- “Person first, Kin second, Others last”. While we can sense that issues and complexities galore might crop up due to these but I recall an expression (it strangely fits in the context) “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”.