Instant Genius - Aleks Krotoski: What happens to your data when you die?

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

What happens to all your digital data once you die? We ask social psychologist, host of BBC Radio 4's Digital Human and BBC Science Focus columnist Aleks Krotoski about life after death, and she enlightens us on how much digital data is really out there, the value of virtual gravestones and why big data firms really don’t care if you’re alive or dead. If you have a burning science question you want an expert to answer, send them to us on twitter at @sciencefocus, and we may answer them in a future episode. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Dr Kathryn Mannix: What it’s really like to die Robert Elliott Smith: Are algorithms inherently biased? Gretchen McCulloch: How has the internet affected how we communicate? Caroline Criado Perez: Does data discriminate against women? John Higgs: Are Generation Z our only hope for the future? Jesse Bering: What psychology can tell us about suicide Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit Name Audio, There are two different aspects, two different facets to our online lives, the online self, our online identity that we generate, that we kind of think represents who we are. And then the other side, which is the stuff that the businesses and the other organizations that operate online use to identify us, all of that data is around. It follows us around. It circulates us. It's like we're in the center of this crazy data galaxy.

And it doesn't stop when we physically stop in this world. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. We'll look out for us in your app store. Hi. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus. and this week we ponder life after death. No, I'm not talking about some heavenly afterlife

or the possibility of reincarnation, but what happens to your digital data after you die? Alex Kratoski is a social psychologist and host of the BBC Radio 4 series Digital Human, and in this episode, she enlightens me on how much digital data is really out there, the value of virtual gravestones, and why big data firms really don't care if you're alive or dead. The first obvious question is that, is that

what is our digital data and how much of it do we have? Oh, man. We have so much digital data. I don't think we, in fact, I know we can't comprehend how much stuff we put online. We literally cannot comprehend. There's stuff that we put online 20 years ago when we didn't even realize that it was online. Or there's stuff that we gave to companies even before the internet was a thing, or perhaps the web was a thing, that have been translated. into online data. There's stuff that other people say about us, which is actually kind of data

about us. It's kind of our digital data. We may not have direct ownership over it, but it certainly forms our digital online selves. There's so much stuff that's out there about us that effectively it isn't not only an extension, but it's kind of like some people have described it as a shadow of our lives. I don't think it's actually a shadow because, well, that would suggest that that in some way is not alive and not constantly being generated. And in fact, after we die, it is still being generated, whether it's through data points that are official data points, or whether it's through those interpersonal conversations

that happen to talk around us or reference us or any of that kind of thing. So we have a lot of data online. All right. Okay. So that data that we're creating, like you say that there's things that were before the Internet, things that are going on now. I sort of, when I think of the data that I'm producing, I'm like, okay, I make searches.

I go on Twitter and Facebook and that sort of thing. But I guess by the sound of it, there's a lot more there that we don't really sort of, you know, put together as these are our data points. For sure. And I like to describe this as the distinction between digital identity and online identity. So our online identity is that thing that we think about when we think about our online selves often. You know, this is what we put on Facebook. This is the stuff that we kind of, that represents who we are in a kind of psychological and a social way. Who are you online?

Well, you know, this is my profile picture or this is the stuff that I've written as an update or even this is the type of thing that I consume as a news or an information consumer. That's our online identity. And that's the thing that's kind of ambiguous. It can't really be locked down. we like to interpret that and we like to have ownership over that self. On the other hand, there's something that's also known as digital identity, which is in the trade. That's the thing that is our authenticator. That would be things like passwords or bank details or our address or our IP address or our Mac address,

Mac being the thing that is the identifier on a mobile phone. So there's all kinds of identifiers and authenticators that we don't necessarily think about that are also part of our identity. You mentioned search. I think that's a really great example because people forget very quickly and some people don't even realize that our searches are actually being recorded in order to give us better search results in the future. And that's part of our digital selves as well. So there are two different aspects, two different facets to our online lives, the online self, our online identity that we generate, that we kind of think represents who we are. And then the other side, which is the stuff that the businesses and the other organizations that operate online use to identify us. All of that data is around. It follows us around.

It circulates us. It's like we're in the center of this crazy data galaxy. And it doesn't stop when we physically stop in this world. So how would we, you know, is there a way that we're able to sort of, you know, even before we die, say, okay, here's all this data. How can we collect it all into one place essentially to say, okay, this is my digital identity and this is my online identity? No chance.

No chance. I remember in, when was it? It must have been like maybe, maybe. maybe 2003. I think it was before I started doing my master's degree. So maybe it was 2003. A friend of mine, she worked in television and she was always on the lookout for stories.

And she and I had, we went for a beer or something, we were in the pub. We were in, I remember exactly where we were. We were right next to Edward Road Station, the bit that's in Shepard's Bush, not the other one that's down the way. So we were in a pub. It was a really nice pub. And we were just sort of, you know, shooting ideas around. And I remember we came across this one idea.

We sort of landed on this thing. And we spent a long time talking about it. Doing a program or some kind of investigation as to whether we could disappear online, whether we could just literally not from now I'm disappearing. Because that's relatively probably not that easy anymore. At the time, you know, you could stop producing content online. But I mean disappear completely. Like in the good old days when there was like everything was paper based and there was a fire in the records department and you could just not exist.

You just never existed. You could take away all the Swiss bank accounts and you could, you know, you could get rid of your of your birth certificate and any marriages. You know, in the good old spy thriller kind of way. No. And at the time, we realize that even at that early time in our web lives, it would be really, really, really difficult to do. How to disappear completely. Not possible even then. Since that time, and this is, you know, we're talking a long time ago, we're talking 15 or so years ago. Since that time, we've been tracked. We've been traced everywhere we go with our, with, you know, with the computers in our pockets. Every time we log in somewhere, we are leaving digital traces of ourselves.

And that means that we have no possible way of creating some kind of itemized list of what our digital identity is. But of course, you have to think about this in the same way as offline. While it may not be physically recorded, though that depends upon, you know, how many CCTV cameras exist in the country that you live in, or other types of observation techniques that are used for security or for business or whatever. We've always left little pieces of ourselves around. They haven't been recorded necessarily into permanent record, but they have been recorded in other people's minds. And the way that other people have always thought about us

and the way that our identity is formed within the social environment, it's very similar. The difference, though, is that we weren't at that time able to, to itemize everybody else's opinions about us. Now we can't itemize all of their opinions as well as all of the things that are recorded about us in the digital space. And so I imagine, you know, we've got, we've put all of this data into places like Facebook or like Google like that and we could sort of collect it all individually in one place,

but then there are other places like you mentioned CCTV cameras. You know, they can see us, but with things like AI and face tracking software, there must also be a whole collection of data that we could just never get our hands on it, no matter how hard we tried. We just don't even know it exists. There was a really interesting article that happened late in 2019. It was published about a woman in China who had facial surgery, facial, you know, just she got a nose job or something like that.

I don't know the details of what she did to her face, but she did enough to her face that all of the facial recognition technologies that are now used for things like access to the train or access to her bank or access to school, these places she couldn't get in anymore because her face was not recognized by the AI anymore. She had done such a dramatic change to her face that her nose was too different for the AI to recognize that she was the person that she had been who had that name, who had that identifying feature before so she could get on the train, so she could get into school, so she could get into work so that she could access her bank account. That's, you know, like the, weirdly, it's the not so distant future because it's actually

happening somewhere in the world. And while we haven't experienced it so explicitly yet in the West, in Europe or in the U.S., it's coming. And certainly our facial recognition software, hugely controversial, but regardless, it's kind of encroaching all that data. We don't know who owns that data. We have no way to track that data down. All of this stuff exists beyond our kind of ken. And we made an episode for Digital Human about four series ago called Sublime, which was about this idea of the concept of the amount of data, the amount of technology, the amount of infrastructure,

just literally the networked world that we exist in, and that it is beyond our comprehension, that it has achieved the idea of the sublime. And man, if we have poets writing about what the sublime is, you can imagine that individuals are not going to be able to tap into their own degree of the sublime and have a nice dossier about what their digital selves are. So that leads us on quite nicely to the fact that, okay, yeah, there's a huge, huge, like incomprehensible amount of data about us while we're alive.

the next thing that happens is obviously what happens to that when we die. In the good old days, or the bad old days, depending on how you view it, in days before the web and before the internet, we would fade away. Unless we were particularly well known or we did something controversial or whatever, unless we had some kind of notoriety, unless, as the song for Frame says, we lived forever in people's minds, we would ultimately fade away. And I remember years ago standing next to this extraordinarily beautiful church in Northumberland. It's a National Trust property.

And it's right up on the hill right next to Whitley Bay. And there's a there's a gravestone. It was made of sandstone, probably not the best material to put next to the North Sea. So you can imagine that the whole thing has just kind of like been crafted, has been etched away by the sea air. and the blustery sea air at that. It's sort of, it's faded this beautiful church away, but it's also faded all the letters on the tombstones away in such a beautiful, organic way that it's almost as if they're melting away. And I have no idea who was buried there. There's probably somebody somewhere in the world who's like great, great, great, great, great, great, grandparent,

you know, lives or died or resides, shall we say, underneath that tombstone. But it's very difficult to kind of remember who that person was, what they did, what they thought about, what type, you know, how many eggs they bought, you know, if they went on adventures, if they had interests in particular ways, because our social memory just faded away. Now, we don't yet have a facility for allowing our digital lives to disappear and fade away. I'm not suggesting that that will never happen. There have been suggestions in the past to try and create systems that that over time kind of forget and our digital data fade away. That I think is too complicated an idea across the entire sublime nature of our digital footprint. But still, we don't have the opportunity to fade away

as much as we had in a time before everything was recorded. And so we're in an interesting moment because we've never been so self-obsessed. And so record hungry throughout our history, at least, you know, across such a mass observation and with such specific, you know, specific nodes, specific points in a in a data set. So it will be interesting to see what happens as we as a society come to terms with the fact that once our physical selves are done, we, and I mean not just the people who, you know, achieve notoriety in their lifetimes, but every single person who's lived is going to live forever. And we're going to have all this data. And what does that mean? That sort of sounds like in the future, with all the data we're collecting now, we'll be able

to sort of have this sort of, not holographic, but virtual representation ourselves that that exists because of that data we've collected. Like Elvis. Elvis still goes on tour. Michael Jackson goes on tour. Yeah, absolutely, in theory. But also, but I think that within that question is an assumption that I don't agree with. And the assumption is that our online selves are the reflection of our offline selves. As I mentioned, we have these two senses of self. We have the, sorry, we have these two online identities. We have the online and then we have the digital identity. Big data, which is, you know, is the concept of the huge vast rows of data that we have about each and every one of us and the idea that it can be crunched in an aggregate to create interesting concepts and ideas and artificial intelligences and machine learning, et cetera. That data is only as good as the data that was put in. When I was doing my research, one of my favorite comments on the,

the methodology that I was using is, you know, somebody said, don't forget, rubbish in, rubbish out. If the data that we have about ourselves online doesn't actually represent who we are, but only represents a particular element of us, then that data will be a kind of an ill-fitting hologram. It won't be us. You know, it won't be the clone, which, of course, at that point, when you're talking about clones, you're only talking about the physical self. you're not talking about the mental self as well. It depends very much. See, this is where we get really into like philosophical questions. That's what I like about this idea of death and data,

is that it sort of starts to challenge us about what actually the self is and does it matter if all you get in the future from this hologramatic representation of the data that we put online or that was gleaned about us doesn't. actually isn't actually the self that we were. We're dead. It doesn't really matter, but does that matter to the to the people around us? I don't know. So you would get a, you would get an imperfect representation of you, Al, if somebody just used the hologramatic data that was available online. I suppose it's like that, you know, the saying history is written by the victors. In this case, the victors are just ourselves writing our own representations of what our life was like, essentially?

It's amazing for future scientists, for future social scientists. I mean, the mass observation projects from the 30s were extraordinary insight into people's lives that we still reflect on today. And of course, that's continued. You know, the British Library continues the mass observation project. And then you have other projects of people seeking to document public health issues. Epidemiologists use these longitudinal studies. studies to understand, you know, the nature of both, you know, physiological issues but also

social issues. And that, having that data as an aggregate is fantastic. As individuals, I mean, really, seriously, like, you're, I'm sorry to say, but we're all not that great. The fact that we document so much about ourselves is going to be super useful in the future in aggregate. But very few people are going to be. actually interested in who you were as an individual. So how we parse all of that information once our generations have gone and the future generations have a way to even conceive of trying to get through all this data and look back and kind of dig archaeologically through our data.

We're not that important, but I think as an aggregate, it'll be really interesting to have all of these data points to understand one aspect of our society and how we operated. So I do want to come back to that big data point in a minute, but just on the lines of where you say that, you know, are, you know, who is it important for? Essentially with things like, you know, if you die and you can create a Facebook memorial, well, not you're obviously dead, but Facebook can create a memorial page view. Who is that serving?

And then how long is that serving them for? It depends, doesn't it? I mean, I have a, I have a friend who died and his memorial still exists. And he died a while ago now and people still comment, you know, thinking of you or, you know, is anybody else remembered that, you know, this happened at this time? And it's a way for us to gather and reflect in the same way that, say, a gravestone used to be the place that people would gather. It is still a place where some people gather. I go visit my dad and my stepmother's graves in Louisville.

Louisiana, there are people having, you know, families who come together and they, you know, they have jambalaya, they have food, you know, picnics at the cemetery. There, and in Los Angeles, you have huge Hispanic families who come to the cemetery on days off and they just hang out and they just have picnics and the kids play. So it depends upon, you know, I think it really depends upon the culture and the individual as to what those memorials mean. The fact that they're virtual means then that, you know, people who can't go to a physical grave site or to a physical cemetery, if that is what the person has chosen to do with their remains, then, you know, that's great. That allows more people to gather. That's really who they're for. It's for the, it's for the people who are left behind. Ultimately, what we're not, when, when somebody dies, it is the people who are left behind who require the greatest care because the person, has gone. And it's their memory and it's the people and it's the emotional support of the people around that person who loved that person. They're the ones who need to have those reminders, who need to reflect, who need to be supported by one another. And that's who those memorials are

for. Do you think that there's, you know, we need to make sure that those memorials remain in place? So, for example, you know, there's a cemetery near my house and it's a beautiful, place and it's a really lovely place to go and sit and walk around but I don't know any of these people you know these people all died a long time ago and you can see on their gravestones they died you know 1950 1920 and before you know that in itself is a as a legacy that is not really catering for the people who were their contemporaries does you know does there need to be a digital sort of a similar digital thing well it's interesting because I went recently to last day of the dead in Los Angeles.

And Dia de los Mertos is such an important part of the South American, the Central American experience. It truly is one of the most beautiful things I have been to. I find it amazing. And it happened to be at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery because I was in Los Angeles at the time. And they do this massive thing where everybody dresses up and we're all dressed up as, you know, the sugar skulls. And they're selling the sugar skulls. And there's these altars that are there that are either over existing graves or in a different section of the cemetery, which happens to have a big sort of central park area where people can gather and, you know, have picnics or do music or whatever as well within the boundaries, within the grounds.

And it's a place where people are able to celebrate their families, their love. their loved ones, people that they've never met. Have you ever seen the film Coco? I haven't, but I know the one. Oh, my God. I love it. I love it. Oh, I'm so glad that they made that film at exactly that time because I happened to be going through a lot of loss in my own life at that time when it was released.

And for me, it was such a great comfort because the premise is that this young boy, he's called to music. His whole family has eschewed music. They said, no, you can't do music because it, you know, it ruined. our life, your great grandmother loved a man and he went away from music and he abandoned the family and blah blah. And so we mustn't do music, but he's called to music. And it's his search for why he's called to music. And he ends up in the land of the dead on the, on the day of the dead, which is when people gather in cemeteries to light candles or put flowers out. This is big in

Poland as well. You find it in most Catholic countries, actually. They come, even if they don't know the family, the family members. And the little boy goes and he discovers his great, great grandfather. He's never met him, of course, but he meets him in, you know, the land of the dead. And the thing about graves and the thing about cemeteries and the memorials, and any kind of memorial, whether it's a digital one or otherwise, it's a place for people to feel a connection with the past, to feel a longevity, to feel a sense of who they were for better or for worse. And I don't think that those are ever going to fade away. The fact that the cemetery close to your house is simply a peaceful place, and it's a park,

and it's a place where people can go and enjoy the space and the solitude and the solemnness and the fact that there's a sort of, whether it's an underlying psychological or philosophical concept of, you know, the finiteness of our own existence or whatever. whatever it is, people go there because it's a place of where, of sort of remembrance and reflection. We have these online as well. You have to go to them. You have to find them. They're not as sort of central as memorial parks are in, you know, the physical space. But they serve the same purpose. And I think that they are as valuable. Anything you can do to get through that period is as value. And, to you and to your community and to those people around the person that you lost,

whether they died in the 1920s or the 1850s or last week. I suppose with, as you say, anything that can help people, a lot of these sort of online memorials, their pictures and their photos and their memories of what people said. So that obviously leads me to the next question is that, you know, there are these photos and these pictures exist. Who is it that owns them? So presumably, you know, you don't own them anymore, or did you even in the first place? Well, whoever, whatever site you uploaded them to owns them.

That's the answer. You know, Kodak, just to choose a company out of the air, Kodak didn't own the snaps that you took on their film. You kept them in a, you know, you kept them in a binder or in a book at home, and so you kind of owned that image. You had the negative and all of that kind of thing in the old days. But whatever site you upload these things too has ownership over those images. And that's just the nature of the commercial transaction that we have with the online space that we often forget. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do something nefarious with them.

But, you know, they have the right to use that image for facial recognition technologies or for other R&D activities, or indeed, as I've found myself and other people have found, those images can end up in advertising clear across the world. That's a bit awkward. But, yeah, I had to write to somebody and say, you don't want to be putting my face next to those pots. Why did you do that? What a weird thing for you to do.

So the company that you upload the images to owns those images. So what about other things? So, you know, for instance, music downloads or books or... You can't pass them on. You can't put them into, you can't put them into a will. It's not possible. It's impossible to pass on your MP3 collection to your next of kin. That's kind of sad. That's how it is. Because, you know, the download is, it's within, the download is within, you know, a passworded service. within an app, within whatever. You don't own that data. That's not your data.

You are borrowing that data. You have paid for the use of the license. You have paid basically to rent it. You can't pass it on. So all that data is they're collected within, presumably the majority of all the data is held up and locked up within a few companies. So I don't need to say which are the biggest data companies in the world.

but is that ultimately an issue when you're, you know, just in the general sort of conversation about what happens to your data when you die? It exists out there. More people practically are concerned about making sure that their loved ones have access to their data or at least to those services. So, you know, creating an estate plan that includes your usernames and passwords is a kind of basic, a really, really basic thing to do if you are planning your estate and you're planning. your legacy. There are lots of services and apps that will allow you to do that. But at the moment,

there are only sort of the, they're only sort of the, I'm not going to call them the outsiders, but the sort of peripheral players who are thinking larger than sort of, who are thinking more societally, I would say, about this kind of thing who are concerned about the fact that it is those big companies who own that data. Because presumably there must be some sort of, you know, even ethical thing which suggests that, you know, the big data companies, do they need your data when you're dead? Of course. Of course they need your data. It's data, man. It's data. They can do all kinds of cool things with it. They can crunch it in all kinds of cool ways. They can run your pictures through their machine learning systems. They can learn emotional cadence from the types of tweets and the types of things that you've published. They can learn aspects of human anticipation and sort of anticipated purchasing or commercial power by looking at the searches that you do, they can, or even the things that you've bought in the past. Like, of course they need your

data. You, it doesn't matter who you are. You, individually, it really doesn't matter. You are a piece of an aggregate for whom they are using in order to get smarter. Whether you're alive or dead, frankly, doesn't matter. I sort of, I imagine now that that this data is, once you die, do they, a hard word to say, but do they make it anonymous afterwards? Or are they saying, like, okay, this person is dead, but I'm going to carry on using this data in a way that as if might replicate what they might do if they were alive. Genuinely, they don't even know if you're alive or if you're dead. Perhaps if your data stream in a particular way stops, then they'll be like, this person has stopped using this service, right? if I've stopped using a social network, I could, I might be dead or I might just have stopped

using that social network. Like, they don't know. They're not that smart. They really don't care. They genuinely don't care. They would prefer if you continue to populate their data sets, but they don't, they don't care. What they can, what they really want to use, the value, the true value in the data is in the aggregate, not in the individual data points.

And I think that's something that we forget because of course naturally we're like, but I'm really important and I'm expressing myself. We're really important to our circle of friends and to our families and to those in our close network. We're not important to the companies. So, you know, I was logically thinking, so is there a way how we can protect our data upon death

so it doesn't get used? But actually, does that raise a question that does it even matter if we protect our data? It's too late. As soon as we start to put our data out there, we signed an agreement. We signed a user agreement for every single service that we, every single service that we've used online. Every single thing has a terms and conditions thing. Most people don't even read it. They just take the box that they can get through to the service.

And that just says, thanks for your data. That's it. We got it. So the idea that we can like turn around and say to any of these big companies, right, as soon as I am deceased, as soon as my, you know, in the US, my social security number has been registered as no longer applying to a person. You can no longer use my data. They're like, no, well, you used it when you were alive and you gave me data and that data is valuable. They don't care. They truly do not care. They don't care. That's, um, that's, it's just mind-bogglingly now that I'm just thinking that I was, I sort of came into the conversation, sort of expecting us to say, okay, so your data is very important. And it goes,

one way. And after you die, the conversation is all about who looks after your data and why it's important to do one thing or that. And now actually it seems like, that importance isn't there. It's more important to the people who are close to you and the people who want to remember you intimately as like your family and your friends and that sort of thing. Whereas actually, if the rest of the data gets thrown out to, you know, the big data companies, it's not a problem.

It's not. It really isn't. And we, I sound like, I sound like such like a doom person. But when, you know, it is important to be the, to entrust your data or at least the access to that data to your family and friends. It's really important to do that. Because if you cannot access that after a person is gone, that is a gap in knowledge in the same way that you have no idea what your Aunt Lucy's middle name was because everybody who knew Aunt Lucy died. And you can never track that down. There is like no way to track that down except perhaps online now. But you know what I mean. Like that one thing that you need to know is gone. That information is gone. And if a password is gone or a username is gone, then your entire stream.

of pictures that you put up online is gone. Like you can't ever see that again. You also can't authorize the companies to use or not use your data. So for example, if somebody comes along and besmirches your identity, then if you don't have access to the username and password, then you cannot change that. You still would have an uphill struggle. Say, if you were going to go to a social network and say, I want this shut down, they'd be like, well, you were not listed on the, you know, the power of attorney, you were not listed as one of those trusted people who has authorization over this account. I'm afraid we own this account. They might be like, oh, I feel sorry for you, but to be honest, like, they've got a lot of people who are dying every

day who use their service. So they're not really going to be, like, particularly sympathetic. They see you again as like just a small data point in their gigantic global network. This is not to say that they are bad people, right? That what they're doing is, you. evil. It's just, it's just the nature of it. You know, it's just there are people who are dying every day and that means an enormous amount to, I mean, a profound amount to the people in, in the circle of life that that person lived. But it really doesn't matter to the people who are maybe five degrees away. And we have to think of those data collecting organizations as somebody who's like, you know, a friend of a friend of a friend of somebody who died. They'd be like,

oh, I'm really sorry for your loss, but I don't really know how that affects my life directly. So I'm, you know, sorry. And we just have to kind of like recognize that they happen to have the control over our data because during life, we gave our data to them. That sort of moves me on to the next thing that I want to think about. So obviously we've, you know, once we die, we've given our data away. But then there's also the situation that there are people who have got, say, terminal illnesses and they're in the process of knowing that they are going to die and they've already got this digital identity. What sort of things, you know, obviously, you know, there are lots of exams of people talking about it,

but there's obviously there must be some sort of psychological impact of what you're going to do with your data and how you sort of, you know, clear it up and collate it all together so that once you're, you have died, you know that you're certain where it's going to go. Oh man, would that be the case? My dad, when he was dying, tried desperately to get all of his paperwork in order so that it would just be really easy for me to pack it up and send it to the places that it needed to go. But, you know, after a while, he just got really tired and he just didn't. And so I've spent the last however many years, like trying to make sense of this taxonomy that was in his brain that he was trying to organize all of his paperwork. You know, that would be great if it was at the,

the front of somebody's thing as they're dying, and for some people that is. But the best that we can really do because you just cannot tie up all those loose ends is make sure that your next of kin or whoever you want to look at your laptop. Ooh, boy, that's a personal thing. Yeah, seriously, I would clear that up first because somebody's going to go in and have to figure out what all those files and all the things you don't want people to see. what all that is, you know, in the same way that when somebody dies, they may have a house or an apartment or whatever that you have to go through and clear up. The data is another aspect. So in terms of making sure that the data goes to the right people, that's something that is for a legacy planner. That's something for, you know, an estate planner for, you know, making sure that that's written up in your wishes, whether that's in a will or whether that's in some other kind of legal document. I want my laptop. to go to this person and the username and password are in a sealed envelope taped underneath my desk or whatever that is.

I want to make sure that this person is the owner of all of my photographs, so the username and password is over here. You can say to a social network, dear social network, I'm dying, I have maybe three months to live. Please don't use my data. But again, they're going to be like, well, you sign that. I'm sorry to say, but you signed the terms and conditions. You signed the end, you know, the end user license agreement. And just because you're approaching the end of life doesn't mean that that agreement is null and void. Does that mean that people are starting to take this into account more when they are, you know, preparing for death, writing wills?

Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. When did I, it was digital death day. Let's see. When did I go to that first digital death day? It must have been in around 20. 2012, I think. Yeah, 2012, I think, is when the very first digital death day came out. There's a few researchers who have spearheaded this. One of whom is appropriately, she's going to kill me for this, she's appropriately named Elaine Caskett. Talk about nominative determinism. I've never said that to her. But, yeah, she wrote a book that's called The Ghost and the Machine that I believe was published earlier this year, which is about looking at the data and and, you know, who you are and your rights over it. And digital death day was a,

was an early gathering of people just in the UK who were thinking about this. The UK actually has been thinking a lot about, thinks a lot about death. Weirdly, like it's where the, it's where death cafes started. Death cafes are, or gatherings of people just, you know, in pubs or, you know, down the street or like in the park. People get together and just talk. about death. Not in a morbid way, but just like, so, you know, what are your worries or what do you think about what we should do with our data or whatever? You know, like, it's just a, it's just a forum for people to talk about that particular subject. Now, anyway, digital death day was a gathering of, I would say, probably maybe 20 academics and practitioners who'd come together to talk about their research, how people view their data, how people view, how people view, the end of life experience with data, how people view the ownership of their data, as well as people who had created apps that prompt you to think about these types of issues. You know, where do you want your, where are your usernames and passwords? And we're starting to see

with estate planners, whether they're legal or otherwise, we're starting to see people prompting those types of questions as well. Because you do not have a box of photographs underneath the bed moving forward anymore. Very rarely do you have that? You have a phone. Usually that's where most of it is. Or you have an online service where you've put that.

Yeah, I find it so interesting. I find it, frankly, I'm obsessed with it. That was Alex Kratoski, talking to us about our digital data after death. You can read her column in BBC Science Focus magazine and also at ScienceFocus.com. In the mag this month, we're trying to solve one of the greatest mysteries in science. What is consciousness? There is, of course, loads more inside.

And if you like what you've just listened to, then please leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

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