The Inevitable Rise of Cyber Funerals

"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..." JL

Ruby Lott-Lavigna reports in Wired:

Digital undertakers help deceased clients (or their relatives) remove personal data by contacting the likes of Google on their behalf under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An online funeral can expunge articles or blogposts that mention spent convictions or ensure social media accounts and other online ephemera are locked down and left in good order. When you die in the real world, it’s only proper that you also die on Facebook. And Instagram. And Google. (A) corpse will decompose over time, as will magnolias, but digital legacies last forever.

Your online data is a bit like single-use plastic: there’s tonnes of the stuff and it’s very hard to get rid of. When you die, your physical body will slowly decay, or be sent to a crematorium or dissolved in a tank filled with potassium hydroxide. But that pesky digital corpse? That’s going to be around for a while, like a data soul stuck in online purgatory, never to receive salvation. Unless, of course, you set it free.

All you need to do is organise a cyber funeral. Thanks to recent changes to privacy legislation in Europe and South Korea aimed at protecting the living, we now have more power than ever over our personal information – even from beyond the grave. While this may have felt like a gimmick in the past, cyber funerals – where our personal data is removed from the web posthumously – are slowly becoming a viable option.

But why might you want to book yourself in for an appointment with an online undertaker? While friends, family – or even a legal team – might tidy up someone’s offline affairs, a digital legacy is still left to chance. An online funeral can help expunge articles or blogposts that mention spent convictions or ensure social media accounts and other online ephemera are locked down and left in good order. Simply put, when you die in the real world, it’s only right and proper that you also die on Facebook. And Instagram. And Google.

Digital undertaking is the act of erasing and tidying up your public data after you die. It’s a relatively new idea, but one that’s already taking off in South Korea, according to the Korean Employment Information Service. Think of it as a ghoulish version of the European Union’s right to be forgotten legislation.

For most digital undertakers, the tricky task is to contact the social media companies, search engines or even media companies who publish personal information, and request for it to be deleted when their client dies. If that doesn’t work, then companies – be they in South Korea, the USA or UK – can bury search engine results by flooding Google with new, conflicting data about the deceased.

Santa Cruise, a company based in Seoul, was one of the first in South Korea to take on the task of digital undertaking. Founded in 2008, it was originally an agency for entertainment figures but now specialises in removing personal data from the internet for clients both dead and alive. The company’s scope includes digital undertaking and even “reputation management” for those who have been victims of revenge porn.

“[We] do not use any software [to remove data], but [instead] find articles or any kind of post, and request each company deletes them under the standard form, contract and/or the Sexual Offences Act,” says CEO Kim Ho-Jin. “As of 2017, about 5,500 companies and individuals asked for contracts, with ten per cent of them following through.” It’s tough to remove all the data, Kim says, but claims the company has a 98 per cent deletion rate.

These digital undertakers aren’t limited to South Korea. DigitalOx, a British company based in Lincolnshire and founded in 2017, helps deceased clients (or their relatives) remove personal data by contacting the likes of Google on their behalf under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “If the search engine refuses to remove the content in question then the next step is to take everything to the Information Commissioner's Office,” explains Aaron Young, the company’s CEO. “In some rare cases, the search engine refuses so the final step is to hire a solicitor to take on the case. Of about 80 legal takedowns we’ve done over the last year, 25 went to the Information Commissioner and one of those 25 then had to go to court when Google refused.”

While digital undertakers don’t provide any expensive casket or magnolia arrangement, you’re still going to have to spend a fair bit to get rid of your personal info. Santa Cruise will remove your data for $2,000 (£1,548) a month (around 100 posts can be removed in a week), while DigitalOx charges around £295 to remove one search engine result, and £100 for each additional search engine request. Young does note, however, that as the clients are deceased, DigitalOx will usually present the family with a one-off bill.

Other organisations are finding creative solutions to dispose of data after we die. Fraud, an art duo with a residency at Somerset House Studios in London, run digital embalming projects where they cast hardware containing personal information in resin. While this doesn’t solve the problem of an online digital presence, Fraud’s process renders the hard drives or USB sticks unusable. It’s an artistic take on a growing digital problem – and the aim is to spark a debate about our online legacies. “Digital data funerals are an artistic strategy to discuss the politics of erasure, your right to be forgotten, and also our data ghosts,” says Audrey Samson, one-half of Fraud. “We mix two compounds of the resin, put the USB sticks in silicon moulds, and cast them.” In 15 minutes, the resin has dried, and the personal data is trapped.

You might be able to embalm hardware in resin, but getting rid of the intangible social media profiles of the dead is another issue. Facebook introduced a memorialisation feature in 2009, as well as the option for a legacy contact to delete a dead person’s page in 2015, but the service has garnered criticism for misattributing those powers. In 2014, Yahoo Japan launched its Yahoo Ending service, which, when you die, will delete your Yahoo account, send a pre-written email to your contacts informing them of your death, remove photos and documents from your drive, and cancel subscriptions. The service is set to end in March 2019 due to unpopularity.

But here’s the thing: when more and more of our lives are lived online – from tweets to dating profile and even medical information – how we dispose of that personal data matters, arguably more than what happens to our physical body. That corpse will decompose over time, as will those magnolias, but our digital legacies could last forever.