Science Friday - What Happens To Your Digital Presence After You Die?

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

There’s an established playbook for getting one’s affairs in order before death—create a will, name legal guardians, and so on. But there’s also a newer consideration: what will happen to our digital presences, like social media accounts, files, photos, videos, and more. So how do we manage them, and make sure we’re not turned into AI chatbots without permission? (It does happen.) Information scientist Jed Brubaker studies digital afterlives, and joins Host Flora Lichtman to discuss how we can manage our digital legacies. Guest: Jed Brubaker is an information scientist and head of the Digital Legacy Clinic at the University of Colorado, Boulder.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flora Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, how tech is changing the way that we grieve. People move around a whole lot more. It's not everyone who's going to be able to come back to honor someone when they die. And it turns out that when we can't get together in person, well, we get together online. When we think about getting our affairs in order, there's a well-established playbook, creating a will, naming legal guardians, advanced directives for medical care, funeral plans, but increasingly we're faced with another aspect of our legacy to manage.

And that is our digital afterlife, how we live on after we die on the internet, on social media, even as AI replicas. And yes, that's more common than you might think. So how should we be making arrangements for our post-life presence? Jed Brubaker has a perspective on this question. He's an information scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and he leads the university's digital legacy clinic to help people manage their loved ones' digital affairs. Jed, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. I know people have run into this in their own lives, like a Facebook remembrance page or something like that. And what I have heard and experienced myself, sort of mixed emotions,

where it's both a little unsettling to see this person who's gone, but they're still there and also like it can be quite nice and heartwarming and feed you. And I guess I'm curious how you parse those feelings and how do people generally feel about digital afterlives? Yeah. I mean, it makes me think about my own relationship to these. I did my master's degree at Georgetown really focusing on what digital identities and digital lives were like online broadly. I was really interested in like how people like met each other and dated probably because I was meeting people and dating them, right? But there was this fateful conference I was at 2008, where I ended up sitting with Janet Vertese. She's a sociology professor at Princeton.

We were sitting on the beach, and we turned to each other and we said, hey, have you noticed all these dead people on MySpace? Because we're that old. Right, totally, right? And we both were like, what's up with these dead people? And for me, with a very technology perspective, stepping into this, initially, I was like, well, it just felt wrong. These profiles weren't supposed to be there because, well, the people weren't there anymore. And so we decided to start like a little study right at the beginning of my PhD. And it turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. Once we started looking at these profiles, we realized that the real, real problem would be if

someone actually deleted them. All you had to do is look at the messages that people were leaving to loved ones and the importance that those profiles were playing in their own experiences of sure, grief early on, but then later maintaining a connection, remembering and honoring those relationships. Yeah, I kind of did a complete 180 within the first couple years of my doctoral work and realized that what we really needed was to figure out how to preserve these spaces when appropriate. And in the long term, really actually help people think about how to plan for what's more than just accounts and data. There are memories. I mean, have you studied this? Do they bring people solace?

Yeah. So opinions and experiences have changed. So does it bring people's solace? The answer is different in 2009 versus 2025. When I first started this work and I was doing a big interview study, people, I would tell them what I was doing and they have no idea what I was talking about. By the end of my doctoral work, everyone had the experience of an aunt who had died and had a Facebook memorial. page. So people's exposure to this has really changed, and exposure seems to be the biggest factor that shapes how people feel about this. If you're just seeing like a notification, and this is not an uncommon experience, a notification that like your uncle who's died is having a birthday and you're being encouraged to go celebrate on his Facebook page or whatever social media platform you're on, that can be unsettling. But people in survey work we've done

who benefit from and really appreciate the value of these memorials are people who have actually gone and looked at it and seen the kind of positive ways that it allows people to reconnect. And I guess, you know, if you stop and think about what it's like, you know, in 2025, that's not surprising compared to, say, 1950. People move around a whole lot more. We leave our towns to go to college. We, you know, go to the big city for that job. This is now sounding like a hallmark movie. But it's not everyone who's going to be able to come back to honor someone when they die. And it turns out that when we can't get together in person, well, we get together online.

Right. So the grieving rituals that we have are not necessarily made for the lives that we have right now. And so we're creating new grieving rituals, is what it sounds like. Absolutely. Absolutely. We asked our listeners to share their stories about how they've navigated, you know, digital legacies of their loved ones. and I wanted to share this one with you. My name is Ali. I'm calling from Ames, Iowa. So my father passed away right around the time when Facebook was becoming really popular.

And I remember my brother and I, like, arguing over who would manage the account because he was a little bit older. And I think that was the part that was really the most difficult was, it was an unexpected death, so there was no designated person per se. And social media was new. I think over time, it feels like it's just there. There's not a lot of interactions with it anymore. I think I'm the only one that interacts with the page. I love that there's a chance to honor him, but sometimes it's a reminder, like getting in the notifications in the corner of the Facebook. and it'll be like, oh, you haven't posted in a while

or like, which that's kind of like, oh, well, I don't really need to. Thanks, Facebook, for the reminder. Chad, any response to that? Yeah. Well, the two things that stand it out to me, first is about, well, who manages these profiles? And that's a really great question.

If her father passed away when Facebook was starting to become popular, that was, you know, unfortunately, before Facebook had any kind of robust sets of features, Facebook released Legacy Contact in 2015, which allows you to select a loved one to care for and manage aspects of your online profile after you've died. Full disclosure, I was the lead researcher on that project. So I think it's a fantastic product, but I'm biased.

So, you know, knowing who is going to manage these things is a little tricky. What we find is that people tend to follow the same. practices as you would for your will. And that oftentimes means that you're selecting a spouse, but that maybe isn't always the right choice. Your spouse might not be the most tech savvy person. It sounds like in this case, you had two people who could do it. And like, that's fantastic. But I'm a big fan of like select the tech savvy cousin who like can handle things for you. So yeah, that's the will executor. You know that personality type. Yeah. Well, I mean, it can, but it's, but you need that personality type, but also a person who kind of

of understands the tech space and actually maybe understands the culture too. We sometimes have people who contact us at the clinic who are trying to figure out how to take care of, say, an Instagram account, but they don't actually understand the norms of that platform. It's like having to be the funeral director, but not really knowing what a funeral home is like, right? And so let's find people who can do that in our family. And then if you're stuck, of course, you know, we run this clinic at CU and you're always willing to help people out as they're working through these issues. The other thing that Ali talked about was sort of how the page ages. And her message made me think, you know, do we need to plan for the digital afterlife of our digital afterlife?

Oh, absolutely. You know, one of the things I oftentimes tell software engineers when I go and give a talk or I'm working with a group in, say, Silicon Valley is I explain to them that death is not a bullion. It's not on or off. You're not alive and then you're dead because grief is actually. quite layered. The experience of our loved ones on day one when we die is very different than a week, month, year, 10 years later. And so it's great that companies are starting to create ways for us to manage our digital legacies. But I think there's a lot of work to be done about how those legacies and what the needs are of our loved ones, like how they evolve over time. There's a lot

of work to be done on that front. Yes. We have to take a break, but don't go away because When we come back, would you want to be made into an AI chat bot after you die? There's a thing in our lab we call the Dolly Parton principle. Dolly Parton's made it really clear that no AI should be used to create music, representations of her. We need to let our loved ones know what we're comfortable with and what we're not comfortable with. Here's another message we got from a listener. This is from Chris in Arkansas. My sister still uses.

It's a mix of two that he's gone. I mean, Chris's message really struck me. because it feels like this is something kind of special about the digital age that you don't just have a photo in a photo album. We actually all have this very interactive, three-dimensional, you know, multidimensional media, including lots of audio and video of our loved ones. Yeah. Some of the earliest examples of like a digital afterlife, as it were, are actually of like out-of-office automatic email responses that like people would use and maybe they died while they were on a trip,

or that people stepped in and created one to explain that someone had died. And there's lots of anecdotal stories from, like, I'm talking like early 90s, like early days of the internet of people having their first encounter with these kind of ghosts through these automatic responses. And just like the caller, they have that mixed feeling of like, oh, well, that's kind of unexpected because they're never going to come back from that trip to Denmark.

But also there's something kind of sweet as a way of connecting. We hear this a lot starting, especially after the 2000s of people talking about this, of saving voicemails, calling phones to just hear that person's voice again. And I think it speaks to a broader tendency about how we think about and use technology when it comes to honor and memorialize the dead. You can look throughout time and we have always used whatever the latest technology is that's available to us to help us commemorate, connect with, and honor our loved ones. How is AI changing digital afterwards? The honest answer is that we don't really know yet, but that is a really active place that we're working aggressively on.

When we think about AI in our lab, we are thinking about the kinds of new forms of interactivity it might bring. Are you talking about AI chatbots that are sort of replicas of your loved one? Yeah. So we've been doing work looking at what we call generative ghost. And so these are systems or, and sometimes they're just theoretic systems that we're anticipating coming into existence that use generative AI, like say, chat GPT, to capture some aspect of the deceased. And this could be simply like imagine a wrapper of like a Wikipedia article, something that summarizes like, oh, your grandfather on when he turned 50, here were the six things that were really notable about his life then. But this also can turn into characterizations of our deceased loved ones, the ability to have a kind of conversation with them that's interactive. But this exists, right?

Like these simulations exist already in the world. These simulations exist. There's been a lot of kind of early experiments in this. And none of them are, I think, where we're going to end up in even the next few years. If we think about just the massive amounts of data we're creating, private or not, the opportunity to create, say, using a large language model to simulate a conversation is a very real possibility. I mean, yeah, we've been following the risks of harm from AI and including how chatbots can exacerbate mental health challenges. And, you know, grieving is such a profoundly vulnerable time. it feels to me like there's, you know, real potential for risk here. But how would you explain the risk of this?

So I think I step into this space a bit cautiously and with some insights from the past. Many of the concerns I hear around generative ghosts at this moment sound a lot like the concerns people had around, say, Facebook memorial pages, you know, 10 years ago. And I don't say that to dismiss it, but these are scientific research questions. We're just, we're just, during work right now in the lab, looking at different ways of designing these things. Do we have the chatbot talk as if it is your loved one versus about your loved one to figure out how people feel about it? We're doing work connecting with psychologists who specialize in grief to think about for what populations and in what circumstances do we need to put some constraints around it. As a technologist, I think about this as a set of design challenges. And one that certainly has a lot of weighty obligations behind it. It's really important that we're going to be. we get this right. But again, I want to be careful that we're maximizing the benefits, that

like we're letting people have new, interesting, interactive ways of connecting with their family's history because they're doing it anyway, while also making sure that we know where exactly the risks are so that we can design ways to avoid them or minimize them. What about consent? You know, if you die and you have not given permission to be turned into a chatbot. Can you still be turned into a chat bot? And how should we think about that? Yeah. You know, this is something that we've seen show up most clearly in like celebrity culture right now and in Hollywood. There's a thing in our lab we call the Dolly Parton principle. Dolly Parton's made it really clear that no AI should be used to create music, representations of her, etc. Like this is like she's just

made what her wishes are extremely clear. And of course, the use of AI was a real big concern in the Saginafter strikes. And so when we're thinking about creative economies and creative cultures, lots of concerns here. I think the concerns shift a little bit if we're thinking about private families using these things for private use. And so I think it's important to clarify that. But the consent really, for me, comes right back to this issue of ambiguity. We need to let our loved ones know what we're comfortable with and what we're not comfortable with. In terms of best practices, do you have any advice for listeners around this?

Yeah, I definitely have advice for people when it comes to their end-of-life digital planning. And the first is to have a plan. An interesting contradiction we constantly see in the data is that users, people who own an account, they tend to not actually care too much about what happens. In end-of-life planning, we sometimes talk about this as the double-D. People tend to defer, oh, I'll make a plan later, or they delegate. Oh, my kids will figure out what to do with it. And both of these are actually not kindnesses, because the big challenge here is ambiguity.

And what we find in the data is that while you might not care, your loved ones actually do a lot. They might not know how they're going to use this data, but they want the option to look at it down the line. Don't fall victim to those two Ds. Don't defer. Don't delegate. If it's helpful, think about it as an in case of emergency plan. When I'm talking with younger people, I'm like, oh, imagine that you're like getting a surgery and you need your, you know, significant other to post something on Instagram. Get that set up, right? And that could be as simple as, and I think this is a good minimum, turn to your loved one and say, I don't care what you do. I trust you to make the right choice at the right time.

We have worked with so many people who, they tear themselves apart because they want to do right by their loved one, but they don't know what to do. At a minimum, tell your loved ones that you trust them to make the best choice. That's a bare minimum. The next thing I'd encourage people to do, particularly if they use meta products, Google products, and Apple products, is to go use their end-of-life planning tools. And you can basically set up, they each function a little bit differently. I mentioned earlier about how Facebook allows that legacy contact to manage aspects of their profile. Both Google and Apple will allow a loved one to go download, say maybe those precious photos. And you know, photos is the number one thing that people are approaching

us about they're no longer on the bookshelf, right? They're in the cloud. Don't let those memories be lost. Jed, thank you so much for talking to us today. Always a pleasure. Jed Brubaker, information scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Today's episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.