Death online
October 2022
The death of any prominent figure, let alone a Head of State, inevitably mobilises historians and biographers, who become anxious to see the late person’s archive. In the past, this might amount to boxes of letters, diaries, shopping lists and birthday cards - all of which can shed light on the subject’s life.
These items can even have value, sometimes. You may recall the commotion in 1995 when Winston Churchill’s archive was bought by the Heritage Lottery Fund for about £12m, prompting the possibly harsh joke that the Churchill family had manged to win the lottery without buying a ticket.
However, things are different now; think of your own archive. As you are a reader of this column, I bet that a lot of the notes you write and receive are transmitted electronically and locked behind passwords. How is your biographer going to cope with that?
Any historian will tell you that it’s the informal exchanges and notes that often shed the most piercing light on a person and their views. And that, surely, is what your email, WhatsApp, Facebook messages and the like will comprise.
So, what happens to these electronic notes, not to mention all the photographs stored online, when one dies?
The answer, rather frustratingly, is very unclear. There is no standard procedure, and not even complete clarity over who actually owns these data, and what, if anything, an executor can do with them – even if he knows they exist.
For example, if you use a cloud-based email system like Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, Outlook, BT Email or any of the others, there is a good chance that their terms and conditions state that your emails actually belong to them, not you, and so it’s up to them what happens. Some music download services only sell you a license to listen to the music while you are alive; there is nothing that can be passed on (unlike a CD or a record).
The options open to your descendants when dealing with your digital archive will depend very much on where it is, although the bigger platforms have, finally, given it a little thought.
Google offers you the chance to plan ahead by setting up an ‘Inactive Account Manager.’ You can tell Google to pass all your data on to up to ten trusted contacts after a ‘period of inactivity’ (a splendid new euphemism for death, by the way). Google will consider a request from an executor but may not accede to it; it’s in Google’s hands. Next of kin will not be allowed access.
Microsoft has a ‘Next of Kin Process Team’ which will consider any request but won’t give away passwords. Yahoo are fiercer still: once they hear of the death of a user they delete all content, whatever is there.
Facebook, by contrast, has a fairly sympathetic system in which they offer to either delete or freeze an account – if frozen it remains only visible to family and friends, and drops out of search listings.
It’s all a bit of a minefield, and we are all, including the online platforms, feeling our way, somewhat.
If you really want to preserve your digital archive for your biographer, the best way is probably to download it all from time to time (all the platforms allow this) onto a computer of your own, and make sure that somebody knows what you’ve done and how to access it. Otherwise, I really don’t know how the historians of the future will cope.
For my part, it’ll be a good thing if my grumpy emails are deleted post mortem, just as I shredded my school reports when I found them preserved in my dear late father’s papers. Reading them once was bad enough.
