What happens to our digital lives after death?

I personally believe nothing like photos,videos, Should ever be deleted, As it shows history & How the world around us can change.

If I die, I don’t want any of My data removed or destroyed, But I don’t want anyone pretending to be Me if I die & Making out I am still alive.

History should never be deleted, Imagen how cool it would have been to have the past like 1066 o computers,videos,digital photos, & More, & So many other past dates & historical events.

This is a really interesting question, and I’m not sure what the answer should be – who should I give my data to? My relatives? What if there are things there I don’t want them to see? I think in this situation a lot of people would opt to have all the data deleted rather than have their loved ones finding potentially embarassing or upsetting things.

On the other hand, if it came to other people I couldn’t bear for important things to be destroyed. When my parents pass away I’d like to keep all of their photos, etc safe as they’re valuable memories – which these days we never bother to have printed.

So I suppose my answer is that I don’t want anyone rooting through my stuff, but I’m nostalgic enough to want to root through theirs. I might need to reassess my opinions on this =)

I have always kept my affairs in order to make it easy for people to deal with things after my demise but it is amazing how much nowadays only exists in digital form. The traditional way of dealing with someone’s estate was to see what the post brought each day – you could soon discover what savings, investments, shareholdings, insurance policies, credit cards, memberships and subscriptions were still current and who supplied the electricity, gas and other utilities. This is no longer the case as more and more stuff is done on-line only. I can see no alternative to making lists of passwords, log-in ID’s, policy numbers, account details, and so forth, and leaving them in a sealed envelope with my will. In these days of money-laundering regulations, anti-terrorism precautions and fraud prevention laws, accounts will be suspended and funds frozen in an instant at the very mention of death; it is therefore also necessary to leave a useful sum of money accessible to one’s personal representative so that day-to-day affairs can continue without causing serious problems.
Photos and other mementoes are an interesting question. Perhaps it is a good idea to get all the important ones printed, labelled and dated – if they’re not worth that much effort then maybe they don’t need to be kept for long. Same with e-mails – if they’re likely to have lasting importance they need to be printed off. It’s no good hoping people are going to wander round the clouds digging out your stuff any more than they would want to wade through the miscellaneous contents of a pile of boxes in the loft or in a storage unit somewhere. The basic problem with data in electronic form is volume; it is far too easy to keep everything indiscriminately. I appreciate what Scott Reynolds is saying about his photos and data not being interfered with so they can be kept for posterity and be mined by future historians in order to make some sense of life in the twenty-first century. I have a feeling that we know more about the eleventh century because of physical archives like the Bayeux Tapestry and the Domesday Book than people will about this era in five hundred years’ time because the vital evidence will be buried under a vast overburden of insignificant detail. On the other hand we might wish to live in hope that ever more powerful search engines will be deployed to crack it . . . and expose the utter futility of this pathetic post.

Friends are avid users of iphones, ipads, etc, where all information (read: stuff) is gathered, accessed and stored in “server land” – for a monthly fee
The world of technology is purposely moving us all away from having actual things in our hands that are physical, for the sole purpose of increasing profits. In effect most people merely rent a space to store their “stuff”

So perhaps the answer is staring us in the face?

You had a mobile phone, on that phone were also your pictures. In recent years, that phone memory was in your hand, it was physical, you can take out a memory card or plug in a lead and store your pictures on a hard drive, via your laptop/PC.
Again, your laptop/PC are yours, in your hand, you own them, once purchased, no more needs to be paid to use them.
Now move on to recent times, “smart phones” and the like. Instant access to social media websites, making it easy to upload your pictures.
Your notepad now has to use (read: rent) server space, as its now more of a terminal to access a company’s servers.

A relative has little or no chance of obtaining your pictures from a server, as has been said, once your demise has been noted, accounts close down. Your banking cannot be accessed, your billing will more than likely be unobtainable, that’s providing that those managing your estate have the first idea which companies you were involved with.
What is to stop facebook or a company belonging to them, selling your pictures of buses decades down the line?
Do they take legal ownership of your pictures?

A good way to protect your personal things would be not to give them away so easily in the first place.
Store them on your own hardware instead of in server land. Your family can turn on your laptop/PC and instantly open files, all it would take would be one password left in a will?

You raise a very interesting topic, which reminds me, of how technology wants us to pay for things that we can no longer actually hold in our hands.
When I go, who would get my £500 of tunes stored on my ipad or would they just be wiped along with my account?
In 40 years, will there be anything real actually left that we can hand down to our children?

Gradually, and when I have time, I put photos on discs as a record. Otherwise I have to agree with John Ward that, just as one makes a will, information on passwords, policy documents etc has to be in a sealed envelope along with the will i.e part of the same process. Hard, time consuming but will save massive problems for sucessors.

Perhaps the virtual world is the only way to allow us to continue a fragmentary existence in the real world, after we have become ashes and dust.