Who controls our digital legacy?

Abstract

This master thesis investigates how digital intermediaries Facebook, Google and Apple deal with the digital legacy of their users. In this thesis is via a mixed method approach analyzed how the digital intermediaries deal with the death of a user and which party the agency had to control the digital legacy: the user, the relatives of the user or the platform. By looking into how thanatosensitive the policies are I noticed that there is a difference in degree of thanatosensitivity between the different platforms. Facebook for example gives users the opportunity to appoint someone to manage their account when they pass away. Google also provides this option to let someone handle their data when they die. Whereas Apple does not give an option like this, and is very strict in protecting the data of the deceased. In this thesis is also analyzed how the intermediaries regard ownership, agency and post-mortum privacy around a digital legacy. It turns out that all the parties are quite strict with post-mortum privacy, trying to protect the privacy of a deceased user firmly. These kind of policies come to action when relatives of a deceased user want to obtain the digital legacy of their loved ones. The thesis showed that most of the time they are not aware of the strict policies the intermediaries have, and are surprised that they do not have any agency over the legacy of their loved ones. Furthermore, this thesis showed that most intermediaries outsource the handling of questions around this subject to other users. Which leaves it sometimes a fairly time consuming matter to deal with someone’s digital legacy. The ownership we as users have seems to be small, as our digital legacy proves to be in control of large tech corporations who are not easy to deal with and have strict policies to control our assets.