The real battle for data privacy begins when you die

A bigger issues is that his urgency feels shortsighted to the casual news reader, at times, given that tech companies are reckoning with more immediate, equally pressing social concerns: They routinely make decisions regarding free speech, the workings of democracy and the mental health of a generation of young people.

The stakes can be life or death. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year found that the suicide rate among American teen girls is up 60% from what it was a decade ago, a jump that correlates with the growing ubiquity of smartphones. In 2018, Facebook admitted to culpability for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, writing in its report that the company allowed its platform to be used to “foment division and incite offline violence.”

Despite all of this, no legislation has meaningfully curbed teen social media use or the tech platforms’ influence over political speech. Yes, they may one day decide to sell or destroy the data of the dead, but they already abuse the data of the living.

As with much academic writing, Öhman poses a lot of questions and offers little in the way of solutions. He posits that no business should have the responsibility of deciding what to do with our digital remains, nor should any public institution.

Instead, he says this problem should be dealt with collectively, with “as many people and perspectives as possible be part of the question.” He exhorts us, “Now is the time to start building such systems.” But what those systems look like is still mysterious to him.

In one evocative section, however, Öhman comes close to an answer. He details the death practices of an early Paleolithic people called the Natufians, who lived among the skulls of their loved ones that they decorated with plaster and seashells. Before them, hunter gatherers left the bodies of their loved ones to decay in the wild. But once people occupied permanent dwellings, they had to invent funerary practices. “Like the Paleolithic tribes before us, we must learn to live with a new kind of presence of the dead,” he says.

“We are the new Natufians,” Öhman writes. I take this to mean that we are entering an era where we will be surrounded by the digital remains of our friends and family whether we like it or not.

It suggests that we are in the nascent stages of reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: The people we love will die, but their data will continue to live indefinitely, digital ghosts in the cloud. At the moment, there’s nothing stopping the Metas and Googles of the world from exploiting them—or perhaps worse, erasing them permanently.