You Die. Your Data Doesn't.

He died of a heroin overdose at just 20 years of age.

It was 2003, and he was a good friend of mine both in real life and online.

We got the news from a phone call. It was the dawn of the social web; there was no mass posting to let everyone know. MySpace hadn’t even launched yet.

Yet he was a regular user of several very early social networking sites that catered to musicians.

He and I frequently chatted about our bands on these sites.

I watched as a message board he frequented began to fill up with tormented posts of mourning from friends and family. They spoke to him directly, as if he might somehow reply.

I revisited that page for years, well after the site lost popularity. There were months and months’ worth of posts from his mother, who carried on a one-way conversation with her lost son.

His death was the first time I ever had to consider what happens to our online personalities after we go.

Last week, Facebook launched its “Legacy Contact” feature, which lets us name the person who will take care of our Facebook profile after we die.

It’s strange and unnatural but unquestionably necessary.

The things we casually leave online sometimes turn into twisted portraits of the people we used to be when we die.

Looking through the site called “The Tweet Hereafter” gives you a look at the last tweets people sent before they died. Many are inane. Some are painful. Some are downright scary.

But these don’t provide the full picture.

Our footprints are everywhere, and in the era of open social APIs, a lot of those digital footprints can be traced directly back to us. Comment sections, research portals, e-commerce, banking — any number of sites and services can turn into a loose end for someone to manage when we die.

Google set the pace for this in 2013, when it let users select “inactive account managers” for the Gmail and Google-based accounts of deceased individuals.

Facebook legacy contacts can’t delete accounts or change anything that is already posted, so embarrassing content and bad photos are immortalized.

These contingencies are put on many online services, but the problem is that they differ from site to site and state to state.

If you have an E*Trade brokerage account, for example, executorship is determined by the courts. If you use Yahoo services, they simply delete everything when they receive a death certificate.

So far, only five states have legislation on the books pertaining to digital executorship.

There are a lot of services that seek to create an online memorial site, but services that can comprehensively claim and clean out all the data belonging to the deceased are few.

The U.S. government posted a blog on “social media wills” nearly three years ago, which basically gave five steps to follow:

1. Review policies of sites you belong to
2. Decide how you want to be remembered
3. Give a list of sites and directions to your “online executor”
4. Make sure your online executor is given a copy of your death certificate in your will
5. Check if social media platforms already offer legacy caretaker options.

Not much has changed in the years since this was posted, but there are now dozens of services dealing with wrangling the online presence of a dead person.

Password Box offers a service called Legacy Locker that lets you store account information for your online executor. This includes everything from online gaming accounts to iTunes account information.

German company Netarius sends final “farewell” messages over email and social media, cancels accounts, and wills valuable online properties to loved ones. Rather than tasking a friend or loved one with these jobs, Netarius does it for a fee.

Seattle-based Eterniam started up in 2013 to create “digital estate” offerings that preserve a person’s digital assets and bequeath them to chosen recipients. Eterniam takes a different approach and copyrights the content, turning over copyright usage to each beneficiary.

This is just a small selection of what’s out there, and there has yet to be a — forgive the pun — killer app in the space.

It’s a good reminder that our data will absolutely outlive us; it’s just up to us to take control of it while we still can.

Good Investing,

Tim Conneally

 @TimConneally on Twitter

For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.