When You Die Online

We all live with the newness of technology and the oldness of our social customs, so what happens when death unites the two? What happens to your online self when you die? “When we live intensely on the Web, must we not then be prepared to mourn there, just as intensely? Two thousand Facebook users will die this year, a social-networking death rate of around .8 percent. Facebook and Google and Microsoft are among the few corporate entities with a policy as regards the accounts of dead social-networkers—the ownership of content, who gets access to your accounts when you go, the whole legal and estate-planning and intellectual-property reality of death on the Web remains to be fully defined.”