Digital Afterlife: What Happens to Our Data When We Die
Credit to Allison Saeng on Unsplash
Every day we share, store, and upload fragments of ourselves in digital form: messages, photos, emails, images, metadata. Other people create and share things about us too, sometimes in ways that we can’t control, or don’t even know about. All that digital dust collectively forms our digital identity, an increasingly rich mirror or shadow of our physical selves.
But what happens to all of that data after our physical selves die? The possibility of a digital afterlife is no longer a theoretical question. Digital afterlives are here. They exist by default, shaping how we’re remembered, how the journey of grief unfolds, and how our identities persist online. With the rise of AI, we can even actively influence the world long after we’re gone.
I’ve spent much of my career exploring the intersection where technology, psychology, and mortality meet. As a cyberpsychologist, psychologist and author, I’ve spoken widely on this subject, from BBC and CNN interviews to panel discussions and keynote stages. The conversations I’ve had with interviewers and audiences reveal how deeply people struggle with the emotional, legal, and ethical dilemmas surrounding their online legacies.
My book, All the Ghosts in the Machine, dives into this world in greater depth, unpacking what our digital footprints mean for memory, identity, and control. Yet this isn’t just an issue for academics or technologists; it’s something every one of us will face.
Understanding the digital afterlife, including what happens to our data after death and how to plan for it, isn’t just about protecting information about ourselves and our loved ones. It’s about preserving meaning, dignity, and connection in a world that never truly forgets.
Key Takeaways
The digital afterlife refers to what happens to our online data, accounts, and identities after death, a growing concern as our lives become increasingly digital.
Most people leave behind an extensive online legacy, from emails and photos to social media profiles, yet few make plans for what should happen to it.
Digital inheritance remains legally and ethically complex. Tech platforms often control access to data after death, leaving families in uncertainty.
Preparing for your digital data death (by creating a legal or informal digital will, using legacy settings, and documenting your accounts) can help protect your memory and ease the emotional and practical burden for loved ones.
The psychological impact of the digital afterlife is profound: technology can comfort the bereaved, but it can also complicate grief when reminders resurface unexpectedly, or when bad actors use ‘digital remains’ in criminal or abusive ways.
Digital afterlives can affect the living in other ways as well, including compromising their privacy, cybersecurity, finances, and ability to settle an estate.
What is the digital afterlife?
The digital afterlife refers to what happens to our online data, accounts, and digital identities after we die. It includes everything from social media profiles and emails to photographs, documents, work outputs, message threads, health data captured by smart devices, and metadata - the often-hidden ‘who, where, when, and how’ information connected with whatever we do online.
All these digital traces form part of who we are. In essence, the digital afterlife is the story our technology continues to tell when we’re no longer here to edit it.
As a psychologist, I’ve come to see the digital afterlife as more than a technical or legal concept. It’s a human one. These traces hold meaning. They can comfort, unsettle, or complicate grieving for those left behind. I’ve spoken with families who take solace in being able to revisit old messages or photos, and others who feel trapped by reminders they can’t switch off. Technology allows connection to persist, but it also means that data after death can blur the boundary between presence and absence.
The digital afterlife also carries an environmental cost: those vast archives of memories are stored on energy-hungry servers that keep running long after we’re gone. Our digital remains aren’t weightless, but have a carbon footprint.
The digital afterlife forces us to confront a new dimension of mortality: our data lives on, even when we do not. Understanding this reality is the first step in learning how to manage it for ourselves, and for those who will one day navigate our online legacies.
What happens to our data when we die?
When someone dies, their physical possessions are distributed through wills and legal processes. But the same clarity doesn’t exist for their online lives. Our digital inheritance — the emails, photos, messages, and documents that make up our virtual selves — often remains in limbo with an uncertain status. The result is a growing gap between how we manage material assets and how we handle digital data after death.
How Tech Companies Handle Digital Accounts
Major platforms like Facebook, Google, and Apple did not start out intending to be digital cemeteries. Some are becoming that by default as time goes on, forcing them to come up with policies or tools to address what happens when users die.
Facebook allows users to nominate a legacy contact, request post-death deletion, allow the download of an archive, or request memorialisation.
Google’s Inactive Account Manager lets people decide in advance what happens to their data after a period of inactivity — whether it’s shared, deleted, or passed to a trusted contact.
Apple’s Legacy Contact is a device-level legacy system, allowing people to nominate another Apple user to access certain apps and information after death.
While these systems offer some control, they’re far from comprehensive. Many people never activate them, and families often discover them only after a loss. At a difficult time, navigating each platform’s terms can be frustratingly opaque and emotionally fraught.
Why Legal Clarity Still Lags Behind
The law has not kept pace with the realities of digital inheritance, and ownership and access remain uncertain. You may ‘own’ your content, but the company hosting it still controls the platform. In many jurisdictions, online accounts are treated as licenses that expire upon death, rather than assets that can be inherited. Purchased digital content like films, books, and music fall under this category.
Furthermore, most accounts are ‘one account, one user’ and account ownership or access to contents often cannot be transferred to another person after someone’s death. This might come as an unpleasant surprise, especially to people who are ‘next of kin’ and have certain expectations about what they ‘should’ be able to do.
This areas of ambiguity and ignorance often leave families locked out of treasured memories they want, or practical information they need. In my own work, I’ve heard many stories of people unable to retrieve emails, access photos, or get hold of files that held both sentimental and financial value.
Who Controls Our Online Legacy?
When people think about legacy, they often imagine heirlooms, property, or possessions passed from one generation to the next. Yet today, much of what we leave behind exists in digital form, from photos stored in the cloud and conversations preserved in chat histories to playlists that mark moments in time. Together, these fragments form what I call our online legacy: a lasting record of our personal, professional, and inner emotional lives. Increasingly, as we think through things online with AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, our digital remains also contain cognitive records, showing how we and what we thought.
The question is not simply what we leave behind, but who controls it. Ownership and access are rarely the same thing. You might own the words you write or the images you post, but the platforms that host them often retain ultimate control. Their terms of service (the fine print few of us ever read) determine whether loved ones can access, delete, or even view a deceased person’s account.
Families may struggle to retrieve cherished photos locked behind forgotten passwords, or be denied access to messages that they are desperate too ee. Others face difficult decisions about whether to memorialise a loved one’s account or request its deletion. These are not just administrative challenges; they are moments charged with emotion and meaning.
Our online legacy exists within a web of corporate policies, privacy laws, and human relationships. The balance between individual wishes, family needs, and platform control remains precarious. Until clearer frameworks emerge, our stories and digital selves are effectively held in trust by the companies that store them.
How to Plan Your Digital Afterlife
Preparing for the digital afterlife is about protecting your online legacy and easing both practical and emotional burdens for those left behind. While the law around digital inheritance continues to evolve, there are proactive steps you can take to increase the chances that your wishes are known and understood, even if in most jurisdictions there are currently no guarantees that they will be respected.
1. Take Stock of Your Digital Life
Start by making an inventory of your digital assets. This includes email accounts, messenger accounts, seller accounts on sites like Ebay and Etsy, social media profiles, bank and cryptocurrency accounts, subscriptions that might go on charging after your death, and material in cloud storage. Consider the significance of every app on your various devices: laptops, phones, tablets, smart watches.
Listing all of these elements along with instructions or trusted contacts, is one of the most meaningful acts of care you can offer your loved ones. Families are often left in turmoil because no one knows what exists or how to access it; the double-verification procedures that are so critical for cybersecurity in life can be a real problem for families after death.
Be careful, however, about leaving behind a list of passwords, which can easily fall into the wrong hands and constitute a real risk in life as well as after death. A list of relevant accounts is far safer, and can provide clarity and a way forward during a difficult time.
2. Use Legacy Settings on Major Platforms
Some major tech companies now allow users to set digital inheritance preferences. Some of those (Facebook, Google, Apple) are listed above.
These tools aren’t perfect, but they represent growing recognition that data after death matters. Taking a few minutes to configure them now can spare loved ones months (or even years) of uncertainty later.
3. Create a Digital Will
A digital will outlines what you would like to happen to your online accounts, files, and data after death. It can specify who should manage your social media, which accounts to delete, and what content should be preserved.
Not every platform and not every country or jurisdiction legally recognises digital wills. However, making one, or including wishes about your digital material in your broader estate planning, at least ensures your intentions are recorded so that they are understood. This can help avoid tension when family members want different things or believe different things about what you would have wanted, which can often happen.
Beyond legal clarity, this is also a psychological act, a way to feel some ownership of your digital life, and to consider its impact on your loved ones. For some, the idea of curating their online legacy feels uncomfortable, yet doing so may be far better than leaving it to algorithms or corporate policy.
Finally, preservation or ensure a route for loved ones to access data might not be what you wish for. You might be concerned about private digital information that might feel hurtful or harmful to loved ones, if they were able to access them after death. You might decide you don’t want your digital remains to stay on the servers after your death, for environmental or security reasons. You might decide you don’t want your digital footprint to be used as material to construct a ‘griefbot’ or ‘deathbot’, which is an increasingly common practice. Cleaning up or deleting material might therefore also be an act of care.
4. Talk About It
Conversations about digital inheritance are still rare, but they’re essential. Discussing your preferences with loved ones or including them in your will communicates your values and removes uncertainty. It also helps bridge the emotional distance that can arise when technology mediates our relationships with the dead.
As uncomfortable as it may feel, these conversations give permission to remember, to delete, or to move on, in ways that align with your own beliefs about identity and remembrance.
Planning your digital afterlife is not a cold administrative exercise. It’s a profoundly human one, an extension of how we care for others, and a way to influence the narratives of our lives after we’re gone, to the extent that we can.
The Psychological and Emotional Impact
The digital afterlife reshapes how we experience grief, remembrance, and even the boundaries of human connection. In previous generations, mourning involved tangible rituals through letters, photographs, and belongings we could hold or put away. Now, our online legacy lives in feeds, inboxes, and cloud servers, where it can reappear at any time.
For many people, these digital traces provide comfort. Revisiting a loved one’s messages or photos can feel like maintaining an ongoing bond or a continuation of presence in the face of absence. Psychologists refer to this as continuing bonds theory: the idea that relationships don’t end with death, but evolve.
Social media has made this more visible than ever, giving people spaces to post messages to the deceased, share memories, or mark anniversaries.
But this same accessibility can bring distress. A birthday reminder, an automated memory, or an old conversation resurfacing unexpectedly can reopen wounds. People can then feel ambushed by technology and caught between wanting to remember in that moment or focus on other things.
There is also a deeper tension between remembrance and control.
When data after death continues to circulate through algorithmic resurfacing, targeted ads, or even AI tools that simulate the deceased, it can be hugely challenging. Grieving in the digital age often means confronting the ongoing ‘presence’ of people who are gone, mediated by systems that were never designed for loss. Beyond individual grief, the online world has entirely changed the role of the dead in society.
In psychological terms, the realities of digital afterlives almost force us to navigate grief at least partially in the technological realm. Digital afterlives demand require us to make more deliberate choices about how we will engage with our dead, who can be so present in digital spaces.
Why the Digital Afterlife Matters for the Living
The digital afterlife is now an ongoing part of how we live, remember, and grieve. Our data after death doesn’t simply disappear; it lingers across platforms, shaping how others experience us long after we’ve gone. In this sense, technology extends our stories beyond physical life itself, for better and for worse.
I explore these tensions more deeply in my book, All the Ghosts in the Machine. If you’re looking for a more detailed guide to understanding what truly happens to our digital selves, you can purchase the book here.
Ultimately, the digital afterlife reminds us that when we manage our data in our lifetimes we are also managing our legacy. In preparing our digital lives for our eventual deaths, we also clarify what it means to live with intention, responsibility, and care for those who are inheriting those digital legacies.
If you’d like to explore opportunities for Dr. Elaine Kasket to speak on topics such as digital wellbeing, death and technology, or the psychology of online identity, get in touch here. Elaine regularly speaks at conferences, universities, thought-leadership gatherings, and corporate events in the UK, US, and internationally, drawing on her research, media experience, and real-world stories to illuminate how technology reshapes our most human experiences.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Digital Afterlife
What is the digital afterlife?
The digital afterlife refers to what happens to a person’s online accounts, data, and digital identity after death. It includes everything from emails and photos to social media profiles, health data, and everything in cloud storage — the digital traces that remain part of your story even after you’re gone.
Who owns your data after death?
Ownership of data after death depends on platform policies and local laws. In most cases, users don’t technically ‘own’ their data. They license it to the platform. This means that when someone dies, their digital inheritance is often controlled by the company rather than their family, unless clear permissions or legacy settings are in place.
Can you leave your digital assets to someone in your will?
You can include digital inheritance instructions or wishes in your legal will, although they may not be enforceable. A digital will can outline how you would like your online accounts or assets to be managed, what you would like deleted, and what you would like preserved. While not every platform or legal jurisdiction recognises these documents, they help communicate your wishes and reduce confusion or uncertainty for loved ones. This can help avoid tension when family members want different things or believe different things about what you would have wanted, which can often happen.
What happens to social media accounts when someone dies?
Different platforms have different policies, and some have no policies at all.