The Ugly Side of Digital Death

The first, and lighter, angle of the ugly side of digital death is "Ghosting". An article was published about it in 2012 (Thanks Kaliya Hamlin for sending me the link). 

Information published in obituaries is useful not only for friends and relatives of the deceased, but also for strangers intending to steal the deceased's identity. Obituaries generously provide potential thieves with another aspect of useful information: when will the relevant people be away from their homes, for attending a funeral, a wake or a viewing. The thieves take advantage and use this opportunity to steal physical objects which will both provide them with additional information, and help them tie themselves to the identity of the deceased at a later stage. In some cases, upon breaking into a home, items of financial value will not be stolen - only items related to the identity being stolen: a birth certificate, an ID card, a social security card and a driver's licence. 

One such case of a posthumous stolen identity which made headlines in 2012, is of an illegal immigrant who worked for 20 years as an international airport security supervisor in New Jersey - under the identity of a person murdered in 1992. He passed background checks as he had all the documents required, including a birth certificate and a social security card. 

Another case, which made headlines in 2011, is of a Bulgarian man, who for 15 years used the stolen name and birth date of an American toddler who was kidnapped and murdered when he was three years old, in 1982. This was revealed thanks to a routine check up performed by the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, called "Operation Death Match": comparing passport applications to state death certificates. Thanks to this program, more than 150 stolen identities of the deceased were revealed, including that of a 41 years old Englishman who went under the identity of an American who passed away in 1994. 

In order to avoid "human ghosts" using the persona of someone dear to you who passed away, these article, video and post recommend that you minimize the data about the deceased you publish online, and notify all relevant parties, including credit card companies, banks and local and governmental authorities, of his or her passing. 

The second, and darker, angle of the ugly side of Digital Death is Death Trolling - a phenomenon which ranked seven in the list of the ten most disturbing online communities you might come across, published in August 2012 in the American website "The Next Web" (Thank you Ayeley Yagil for sending me this link). 

Luckily, I haven't come across this sickening, revolting phenomenon in person, of memorial pages and commemoration sites, targeted for destruction and bullying which add sorrow upon sorrow and pain upon pain - as in this case, when a memorial website for a 17 years old who killed herself in the US was mutilated. 

Sean Duffy displayed even greater cruelty and evilness: an English "Death Troll" who looked up children's memorial websites in order to mutilate them. He created horrible things such as a Youtube video in which the face of a 15 years old girl, who committed suicide on railway tracks, were placed on a moving train, with the soundtrack of "Thomas the Tank Engine" in the background.

In another appalling case, he wrote to the mother of a 14 years old girl who died of an epileptic seizure: "Help me Mummy, it’s hot in Hell".  

I admit it's not easy for me to put these atrocities in writing. 

Sean was arrested and jailed for 18 weeks - too short of a sentence, if you ask me. He was also banned from using social networking sites for five years - I wonder how this prohibition can be enforced. 

An earlier mention of this terrible phenomenon appears in NBC's news broadcast from March 2010 (Thank you Dr. Carmel Vaisman for sending me this link). They are addressing the same case of the 17 years old girl from the US, including quotes which are difficult to view: she committed suicide by hanging, and horrible cruelty was directed at her family as they were harassed by death trolls, bombarding them with multiple images of ropes and written remarks which included the word "hanging". The death trolls behaved in an even more appalling manner - which got omitted from this news coverage, in order to spare the viewers feelings , as can be seen (I mean, not seen) in this piece: 

NBC mention another - and earlier - horrifying case, from 2006, which received more media coverage - "earning" an 18 years old girl, killed in the US in a car crash when she lost control over the vehicle she was driving, her own Wikpedia entry. 
Photographs taken by Highway Patrol officers at the site of the crash later leaked to the Internet. They were not only posted and reposted online, but in an act of extraordinary cruelty, were sent to her family as attachments to email messages, under false, innocent headlines. They were cyber bullied so forcefully the family stopped using the internet all together for a while, took their other daughter out of school and put her into home-schooling. In this case too, the pictures fall under the category of images unfit for showing on TV - but, as it turns out, sadly for us all, can be shown online. 

Updates

I'm sorry I haven't been updating the blog lately. I've been busy with the trial against the driver who killed my brother. 
I hope to go back to writing and updating soon. 
Thank you for your patience and concern. 

July 2013: A Feature About the Blog and me was Published in "Haaretz" Newspaper and News Website

A feature about the blog and me was published in Haaretz news website and newspaper: 
"Dear sis, please update my status after I die"

You're welcome to contact me for lectures in either Hebrew or English at: death.in.digital.era@gmail.com. 

'Digital Dust' Turns One Year Old, You're Invited to a Lecture (free admittance, registration in advance required)

In July 2012 the English version of the blog "Digital Dust" went online (The Hebrew version of the blog went online in June 2012 and can be found here). 
In July 2013 I'm giving a lecture at Google Campus in Tel Aviv, to mark this occasion, the blog turning one year old: "Memory, Commemoration and Self Commemoration in the Digital Era".

Entrance is free of charge, registration in advance is required. All the details can be found here. 
For those of you who are on Facbook, an event can be found here. Please feel free to invite your friends. 

"Haaretz" newspaper published a feature in English about the blog and me, inviting people to the lecture. You're welcome to read it here. 

Among the subjects I'll address in this lecture are: 
How will the 'digital footprints' we're leaving behind affect the way we'll be remembered? How will it affect the way we'll remember others? 
What shall we take with us from our home if it goes up in flames, if we no longer print pictures and place them in photo albums? 
What does Holocaust survivors have to do with holograms? 
What does gamers have to do with commemoration? 
Is immortality already available to us, only in a manner which does not include our physical bodies? 
What does Australia have to contribute to this debate? 
And what does it all have to do with realizing we all have digital and virtual assets, and it's important to manage them? 

I'll be happy to see you there.  

Google Campus, Tel Aviv 

Vered Shavit lecturing. 

Photographer: Yoram Peres

Courtesy of the Kaye Academic College of Education, Beer Sheva

How to Handle a Computer Belonging to a Deceased Relative? - My Own Way of Coping

Coping with the digital legacy of the deceased is a delicate, difficult, intricate and extremely personal matter. When I took it upon myself to go through my brother's personal computer, who was killed when he was hit by a car at the beginning of 2011, I felt very lonely, as if I was the first person on earth to deal with this heavy load (this of course is not true, but that's how I felt at the time). If you are also in this grim predicament, I would like to share with you my way of dealing with my brother's legacy. There are, of course, many ways to do this, and no one way is better than the other. This one was simply my way.

My brother was killed when he was 55 and a half years old, divorced, with two children in their early 20s. A man who lived life to the fullest, with personal and professional relationships and an unusual knack to touch the lives of many.

It was clear to me that I should have to go over his personal computers before handing them over to his children, in order to neatly "fold" away his life in the most respectable manner. There were saved files with professional material that I wanted to forward to his colleagues, there were friends who requested me to remove personal correspondence from it and I also received requests from friends and acquaintances for pictures Tal took but didn't have the chance to send out.

The email accounts

I got into each of my brother's email accounts and proceeded to do exactly the same in each:

1. By using the search engine that all email service provider have, I searched for both the addresses and names of those who requested me to delete their correspondence with Tal. As soon as their name or address appeared, I deleted those mails from both the inbox and the sent mail box, without reading them (I mean, of course, permanent deletion, not just moving to the trash file).
2. I arranged the mail messages according to the name of the sender, and opened the first mail from every sender with a female-sounding name: If it was a professional correspondence, I didn't touch those mails and did not open other messages from the same sender.
   If the correspondence was of a personal, private matter, I closed the message as soon as I recognized it, so I would not read anything beyond the bare minimum needed for identification, and deleted all mail received from this sender without reading them (so if you dated my brother and are now reading this post – you should know that no one other than you two read your correspondence). I continued in the same manner for every name in the inbox.
3. I did the same as in article 2, this time in the "Sent Items" box: I arranged all mail messages by name of recipient, opened the first message that was sent to a recipient with a female-sounding name, and repeated the process described in the previous article.

An image I found online, demonstrating the process – this is not a print screen of my 

brother's email account

The Computer

• I opened his Pictures folder (luckily, my brother was a highly organized person, which made the search easy) and used the operating system's search option to track down both the images I was requested to delete and those I was requested to send copies of. Sometimes the search required a few search words or values: the name of the person in the picture / the model of the motorbike in the photo /  the photo's date / the photo's location, etc., so I wished to get as many details and data, to locate the specific pictures. Luckily, I was able to track down all the pictures, although at times it took longer than expected.
• I tracked down images and files which I thought Tal's friends and colleagues may want to have – their pictures with Tal, pictures Tal took of them, etc., and made sure they got copies.

A Very Different Approach

I admit that it was hard for me to read of the choices made by Alison Atkins' family. The 16 year-old Canadian, who died from severe Colitis, seemingly wanted to keep certain things private even after she passed, but her family did not respect her wishes:

 Alison's sister attempts to reset Alison's passwords made things worse. She couldn't reset Facebook without access to Alison's Yahoo mail account. But when she tried to log in to Yahoo, it asked her a series of "challenge" questions, put in place by Alison, which she kept getting wrong. She suspects her sister intentionally put in the wrong answers to the questions. "Very sneaky on Alison's part," she says. The same happened with Microsoft Hotmail. ...Alison's sister discovered some of Alison's most intimate thoughts and feelings... On her Tumblr account, Ms. Atkins found a password-protected second blog under the heading "you wouldn't want to know".

To me, this is a very clear "do not enter" sign. Alison's family did not think that way and did enter that blog, in which her sister found posts she described as "dark".

Alison Atkins

Alison was bedridden and aware that she was very ill. She did not die suddenly like my brother. From what I understand from the article, she did consider her digital legacy and chose not only to keep her passwords from her family, but also put obstacles if they tried entering her virtual space.

Again, I am not judging the Atkins family, in their immense pain, and it is possible that because of Alison's young age, her family members felt entitled to enter her digital life, online and virtual, after she died.

You Are Not Alone

I find it important that people who have lost their loved ones and have arrived at this post from browsing the web, may find it useful even if their choices are totally different than mine, finding solace in the fact that they are not alone in trying to cope. You are more than welcome to email me (even anonymously) with your own account of dealing with digital legacy, or even leave a comment here – perhaps reading this will be helpful for other people coping with a similar situation.

Dealing with digital legacy is hard and painful, partially – I believe – because there is yet to be any public acknowledgement of the subject: before dealing with the deceased's physical legacy and property (such as his home), it's common knowledge that the experience will be difficult, grim and painful. People prepare you for it, and you prepare yourself.

There is still no common knowledge about how difficult, grim and painful (as well as technically challenging at times) it is to enter someone's digital legacy. People around you are still unaware that they need to prepare and support you during the process, and you still do not know how to prepare for it. I hope that at least in this aspect I can be of assistance to others. I recommend reading my post "After death – caution and attention" before dealing with someone's digital legacy. Additional information you may find helpful can be found in the Technical Guide post.


Thank you Ayelet Yagil for translating this post. 

Presenting the Results of the Survey, Google Campus, Tel Aviv, July 2013

I presented the results of the survey "What shall we leave behind?" at Google's Campus in Tel Aviv on July 1st, 2013. 
A post with the results will  follow soon. In the meanwhile, here are some pictures taken during it: 

Vered Shavit presents the results

 The journalist Ido Kenan is a guest speaker at the presentation 

 Veres answers questions at the end of the presentation

Thank you Jonny Silver for these pics. 

A First of its kind Survey in Israel: What Shall We Leave Behind?

After our death, what shall we leave behind: on our computers, phones, online, in the cloud?

What shall the people who are dear to us leave behind them, once they're gone?

Would we want our loved ones to get access to what we'll leave behind?

Would we want to be granted access to what they'll leave behind?

- Facebook profiles? Emails? SMSs? Images? Texts? Websites? Blogs? 

                     

What if it'll be important to us, or to them, for emotional reasons, to access these varied digital contents?

What if it'll be important to them, or to us, to access it for practical reasons - such as business related, or of a financial value?

In February 2013, the state of Virginia passed a new bill that will take effect soon (It was signed by the Governor in March 2013). The bill  was initiated by Ricky and Diane Rash, whose 15 year old son, Eric, committed suicide and left no farewell letter. When his grieving parents addressed Facebook, hoping some light would be shed on the circumstances that led to his death through his Facebook account, they received a negative reply and were denied access. The bill states:

Powers of personal representatives; digital accounts. Provides that the personal representative of a deceased minor has the power to assume the deceased minor's terms of service agreement for a digital account with an Internet service provider, communications service provider, or other online account service provider for the purposes of consenting to and obtaining the disclosure of the deceased minor's communications and subscriber records. The provider shall provide the personal representative with access to the deceased minor's communications and subscriber records within 60 days from the receipt of a written request from the personal representative and a copy of the deceased minor's death certificate. 

Do you agree with this bill? Object to it? I invite you to participate in a new, first of its kind survey in Israel. Through this survey, I hope to raise awareness to the importance of managing the digital content we shall leave behind, as well as to start a chain of reactions which will (hopefully) lead to a change in the terms of use and the legislation in Israel, prior to a local tragedy of the kind Eric's parents went through.

Last year I discovered that unlike international Internet supplier, no Israeli supplier publishes online its policy in case of a user’s death. More about this can be found in my post "The Israeli angle of Digital Death". 

This survey was initiated by this blog, Digital Dust, in collaboration with the blogs 'Room 404' by Ido Kenan and Jonny Silver and 'Blazing Science' by Dr. Roey Tzezana. I would like to thank the afore mentioned people for making this survey possible. 

This survey is short. Kindly complete it, and distribute to family, friends, colleagues etc., of all ages. Let's start this chain of reactions together. 

The survey is in Hebrew only, as I'm targeting the Israeli audience. If you read Hebrew, please click here to participate.

 Thank you Noa Ron for translating this post. 

June 4th update: More than 500 people participated. I thank you all. The survey is now closed.