Many users tend their presences on social media — on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and a host of similar sites — as scrupulously as they do their own appearance. Old photo albums become family keepsakes, but the pictures, videos, and comments that users post often exist nowhere in the physical world. Taken together, these postings provide a detailed record of users’ lives and may turn out to be, after their deaths, the primary means that their friends and family use to remember them.
This creates some awkward situations — like when a user’s unflattering profile photo or snippy status update upon checking in at the Registry of Motor Vehicles becomes, by a cruel twist of fate, his or her final statement to the world. Facebook’s legacy contact system allows the user’s chosen digital heir to change profile photos and add a memorial post. Intriguingly, and wisely, the company won’t let legacy contacts edit or delete content posted by the original user or have access to their private messages. This seems judicious, an implicit statement that the legacy contact’s job is to tidy up the deceased user’s affairs, not sanitize or expurgate his or her life.
The need for a digital will — or, as Google euphemistically calls it, an “inactive account manager” — is only likely to increase. The more time and energy that living people invest in their social media accounts, the greater their sentimental value to surviving loved ones — and the greater the potential for disagreements, even litigation, among them. But allowing users to select a digital heir entrusts their content to someone who shares their values — as wise an approach in the digital world as it is in the physical one.
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