What Happens to My Online Social Estate When I Am Gone? An Integrated Approach to Posthumous Online Data Management

Technology and the digital world have been making an important part of people´s lives nowadays. As death is unquestionably a crucial and fundamental part of life, technology and the digital world ought to play an equally important role in end of life issues as well. For instance, the adoption of online social networks (OSNs) has been amplifying to cover large numbers of the world´s population playing big roles in shaping their daily life, in documenting their life experiences, and in sharing their moments with their friends in the network. While current systems focus on the provision of usable and attractive features of their OSN services, considerations of the faith of the online accounts, identities, and data created and shared in their realms when the owner is mo more available to manage them have not been equally taken. In this paper, we raise and discuss issues related to the design and to the provision of integrated services for a posthumous data management that would respect the wills of users all while being concealed to their survivors. We survey the existing practices, we discuss their limitations, and we suggest an integrated approach to posthumous data management based on posthumous data planning assisted by data categorization and automated tools.