Abstract
The digitization of social interactions and daily activities means that multiple aspects of our daily lives are documented and stored, and social interactions leave digital traces. The accumulated data do not evaporate upon death, and questions about posthumous privacy and impression management arise. Drawing on eight focus groups comprised of Israeli Internet users from various backgrounds, the article points to the perceived interrelation between posthumous impression management and respect toward the dead and identifies a pervasive normative stance that advocates for the continuation of privacy management from life to after death. We call it the continuity principle. The living users position their personal data across two axes of public–private and in life–after death and manage access to their data accordingly. The findings suggest that given a digital footprint and possibilities to access digital remains, the separation between life and death erodes. However, users opine that in-life norms should linger and survive death.
Introduction
Sociologist Erving Goffman (1956) famously defined impression management as the information people give or give off to convey a message about who they are in an effort to shape how others perceive them. Today, as social interactions become digitized, intermediated, and often public, impression management draws on people’s disclosure or non-disclosure of personal data in various online spheres. Impression management is intertwined with online privacy management, referring to privacy’s social dimension (Raynes-Goldie, 2010). When a person dies, the online footprint becomes their digital remains. This article probes the posthumous impression and privacy management of digital remains. Based on focus groups (FGs) with Israeli users, we identify that users have an interest and a normative stance in extending ante-mortem privacy management posthumously. This is the continuity principle of digital remains.
Digital remains of one person become the ingredients for commemoration by others. Given that the dead can no longer manage their impression or control their personal data, access becomes crucial: Who can and who should control access to digital remains? Do the users’ ante-mortem wishes matter? What is the role of online platforms in enabling posthumous impression management and in facilitating commemoration? These are important policy questions. In this article, we focus on the users’ perspectives.
Consider the following scenarios:
These scenarios illustrate that impression management has undergone two important shifts: It is digital, and it faces the posthumous challenge. As for the digital shift, in an analog environment, impression management was performed face-to-face, in front of “an audience” (Goffman, 1956). When online, social interactions, including impression management, are no longer bound to shared spatial-temporal space. Impression management can employ various performative elements, such as online posts, photos, and digital interactions, such as “like,” “share,” comments, and “check-ins” (boyd, 2004; Fordyce et al., 2021; Hogan, 2010; Proudfoot et al., 2018; Saker, 2017). As for the posthumous shift, while users were alive, they managed the data—consciously or by default, and decided whether to give or give off which data to whom. After users die, the data become digital remains that are often orphaned and unmanaged or subject to automated re-distribution by the platforms. While there are online tools for managing access to digital remains, their use is still low (Digital Death Report, 2018; Morse and Birnhack, 2022).
The combined effect of the digital and the posthumous shifts augments the complexity of impression management, as there is no longer a “backstage,” and the re-presentation of self on the “frontstage” is subject to archived data and access to them by previous “audiences” of the deceased (Fordyce et al., 2021). Offline, content and objects that people accumulate during their lifetimes are physically and directly accessible to members of their household and are limited in scope, though they may become more meaningful posthumously (Gibson, 2014). Online, content often resides on remote servers, and accessing it requires platforms’ intermediation. The platforms have their own interests pertaining to preserving the data, and they sometimes utilize past information to enhance engagement (Prey and Smit, 2018). Moreover, the volume is enormous, reflecting almost all aspects of our social life.
This article addresses the complexity of managing access to digital remains and focuses on users’ perceptions of posthumous privacy and impression management: How do users perceive posthumous access to digital remains (theirs and others’), and how do they reconcile online commemoration and posthumous impression management. This issue has some policy, legal, and technological answers; however, our focus here is on the social engagement with the personal digital data of the dead.
Drawing on eight FGs conducted with Israeli Internet users from various backgrounds (N = 67), we identify a pervasive normative stance that advocates for the continuation of privacy management from life to afterlife. The living users position their personal data across two axes of public–private and in-life–afterlife and wish to manage posthumous access to the data accordingly. The most prevalent normative stance expressed by participants was the continuity of digital remains: facilitating access to personal digital remains that had been accessible during the users’ life and vice versa, denying posthumous access to personal data that were private. Applying this principle to the reviewed scenarios, for Alice and Bob, there was a discontinuity of their impression management (in opposite directions); for Charlie, continuity was qualified—there was discontinuity vis-à-vis his parents and continuity for everybody else; and for Diana, there was continuity.
We begin with Goffman’s theory of impression management and its current appropriation in the digital environment. One of the main manifestations of impression management is online privacy management in life and after death. We explore the various stakeholders who have claims on digital remains. We then present the methodology and discuss the findings.
Digital impression management
Goffman’s (1956) theory of impression management suggested theatrical metaphors—like “frontstage” and “backstage”—to capture people’s wish to control their self-presentation and adjust it to a given situation and context. The metaphor is also useful in relation to the audience observing the “personality show” on display. Impression management is a practice designed to “prevent outsiders from coming into a performance that is not addressed to them” (Goffman, 1956: 152). The performance, “the show” people put “on stage,” is often tailored to the audience in a specific context—some audiences observe one show; others observe another. These metaphors accentuate the importance of social context. As social beings, we choose which aspects of our personality we wish to perform and manifest in each context.
The digital age introduced new possibilities for social relationships and managing impression (boyd, 2004; Hogan, 2010; Lewis et al., 2008; Proudfoot et al., 2018; Roulin and Levashina, 2016; Saker, 2017). As more social interactions transpire via digital platforms, digital footprints of everyday life are aggregated and visible to online friends and others: Instant Messages users exchange, email correspondence, photos they post, music they listen to, videos they watch, purchases they make, and much more. These sharing options open new possibilities for users to manifest and constitute their personalities. Personal profiles serve as new frontstages for users to present their personality to other audiences. Similar to the offline practices of impression management, users can choose what to put up front and what to leave backstage, depending on the platform’s characteristics and affordances, which vary from one platform to another. However, offline and online, there is no guarantee that impression management will achieve the intended impression.
Privacy management
The theatrical metaphors associated with impression management increasingly overlap with privacy discourse. Scholars have distinguished between social and institutional online dimensions (Young and Quan-Haase, 2013). The former refers to interpersonal relationships and the latter to the commercial collection and processing of users’ personal data. Most users are unaware or do not fully comprehend the platforms’ dealings with their data, resulting in an asymmetrical black box (Pasquale, 2015). Our focus is on social interactions between users.
Impression management enables a person to decide with whom to share which data, under which conditions, and when, echoing Westin’s (1967) framing of privacy as control. Under this view, privacy is not necessarily limited to secrecy (Solove, 2010), intimacy, or enabling access to oneself (Gavison, 1980). Rather, privacy is the ability to exercise and realize control of personal data (Westin, 1967); it is about the possibilities of controlling how information about the self is being circulated and shared (Austin, 2019). Birnhack (2016) coined the term “privacy circles” to capture the various social circles with whom one shares personal data. Data one shares with a spouse may not necessarily be shared with other family members; the information one shares with colleagues is not identical to information shared with friends.
While the notion of privacy as control is often reduced to the legal requirements of notice and choice, much-criticized today in the context of the institutional dimension (Hartzog, 2018), control is still a valid paradigm in describing privacy in personal interrelationships. Privacy as control acknowledges the differences between various social circles and respects the data subjects’ autonomy to choose and decide for themselves whether their personal data are shared, with whom, how, and when.
The rise of digital social networks challenged the ability to manage distinct circles of privacy, termed by scholars as context collapse (Davis and Jurgenson, 2014; Marwick and boyd, 2010). Privacy circles assume well-defined and manageable boundaries between social contexts. Impression and privacy management, for that matter, require the maintenance of boundaries between the different social circles, feeding each circle with data the subject sees fit. Context collapse is about the erosion of these boundaries. Social networks bundle together family members, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers—all gathered under the broad and obscure categories of “friends” and “followers.” The platforms monetize users’ data (Zuboff, 2019) and entice them to constantly share more personal data (John, 2016). The platforms are not sufficiently sensitive to the privacy circles people maintain offline or to context shifts online (Prey and Smit, 2018). By encouraging sharing personal data with a diverse group of acquaintances, platforms facilitate context collapse, resulting in all acquaintances receiving the same data simultaneously. As Fordyce et al. (2021) observed, applying Goffman’s terms, “specific personal impressions that have been directed to specific audiences break out of their contextual silo and are encountered by wider groups or in other contexts” (p. 119).
In this social context, users suppose a sense of control, which the platforms facilitate and then highlight to their users, only to serve the platform’s interests (Waldman, 2021). Despite the challenge of context collapse, users can mostly manage their (social) information flow in a reasonable manner. They choose what, where, and when to post, block, or unfriend unwanted followers, like or dislike, and remove content they no longer wish to keep public.
Posthumous privacy management
What happens to privacy management after people die? As long as users are alive, they can control social (rather than institutional) access to their personal data and online activities. Upon their death, the deceased users leave behind a massive volume of content and meta-data they no longer control. This lack of control leads to what Schafer called radical context collapse (Schafer, 2021). Once users die, their digital remains are orphaned, but they can still be accessible or surface in various forms. Put in Goffman’s terms, the identity work maintained by the living person, in which presentation of self was carefully crafted to suit different frontstages according to specific audiences, might collapse upon death as archived information becomes accessible (or not) by others.
Fordyce et al. (2021) suggested a typology of posthumous impression management, comprising surrogacy (operation of the orphaned account by another), automated messaging (circulation of messages that were deposited by living users to be disseminated posthumously), algorithmic messaging (computer-generated messaging based on digital remains), and artificial intelligence (animation of dead users based on digital remains). Most of these tools are as yet non-operable (Bassett, 2022). Despite emerging technological tools (Öhman and Floridi, 2018) for managing access to digital remains, as well as some legal frameworks (Harbinja, 2017) instructing who may have access to digital remains and under what circumstances, much social uncertainty remains regarding who can access and manage digital remains (Morse and Birnhack, 2022). This complex picture involves several stakeholders interested in enabling or disabling such access for commemoration and other purposes.
Family and friends
In some cases, once users die, their online profiles turn into websites of memory. Historian Pierre Nora (1989) coined the term sites of memory to capture physical places people visit to perform collective memory work: museums, monuments, and graveyards, where collective memory, literally speaking, takes place. We propose the term websites of memory to capture the virtual places people visit to remember and commemorate their loved ones. A growing body of literature has documented the emergence of digital commemoration practices, such as legacy and memorialization websites. These practices repurpose personal social network site (SNS) profiles as websites of memory or keep deceased users’ profiles active (e.g. Arnold et al., 2017; Bouc et al., 2016; Brubaker et al., 2013; Dilmaç, 2016; Pennington, 2017; Sofka, 1997, 2020). Studies have shown how family and friends visit personal accounts of deceased users on SNSs, flip through online albums, re-read old posts and personal notes, and sometimes post new content on the deceased user’s page.
Practices of digital mourning reflect the continuing bonds approach to bereavement (Klass and Steffen, 2017; Rubin et al., 2018), a phenomenon discussed in digital death studies (e.g. Bassett, 2022; Bouc et al., 2016; Kasket, 2012; Navon and Noy, 2021). Accordingly, friends and family access profiles of deceased users to mitigate their grief.
Given the family’s interest and need, should they have access to the digital remains of the person they lost? It is tempting to turn to offline social norms concerning access to physical objects in searching for answers, but the analog-to-digital analogy is not straightforward. Offline, well-established norms and regulations exist on who can access physical objects. Succession and inheritance laws, as well as social norms, usually prioritize next-of-kin over acquaintances from other social circles. Family members typically maintain physical proximity to objects the deceased left behind, such as letters, albums, and various objects accumulated during their life, reflecting their personality. These objects may become ingredients of commemoration, but usually, only the person holding the object can utilize it at any given time; thus, offline objects are rivalrous. Online, the hierarchy between the bereaved from various social circles has yet to be established. Studies have documented disputes between parents and spouses about access to orphaned accounts (Moore et al., 2017). The use of designated digital tools, such as Facebook’s Legacy Contact option, which could propose such a hierarchy, is still nascent (Digital Death Report, 2018; Morse and Birnhack, 2022). Online content is persistent, replicable, scalable, searchable, and non-rivalrous and can be accessed by many people simultaneously.
Online platforms
Albums and documents once kept in physical folders are now stored on smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. Many online interactions are stored in the cloud and on platforms’ remote servers. Should online platforms keep profiles of dead users accessible? To whom should they grant access? This issue also raises questions about the ethics of online preservation (Öhman, 2020) and the environmental cost of such preservation.
Online platforms have their own commercial interests in digital remains. First, they may be interested in continuing to process the deceased users’ data to train their algorithms in machine learning processes. Second, platforms may be interested in creating a friendly space for users who may not wish to feel that they are roaming in a digital graveyard. Encountering a message, “do you want to befriend Alice?” when the user knows Alice is no longer alive may be considered creepy and deter users. Third, platforms may have contractually committed to their users to delete their accounts upon death. 1 Although the dead will not know whether the platform kept its promises, the living users will.
The upshot is that families’ and friends’ need for commemoration and grief and the platforms’ interests do not necessarily align. Whereas the platforms have the de facto power to determine access, and family members may have a voice, the users’ expectations and wishes regarding their digital remains require more attention, to which we now turn.
Methodology
To ascertain Internet users’ perceptions of posthumous impression management and posthumous privacy, we conducted eight FGs with Israeli Internet users from various backgrounds. We chose this method in light of the assumption that the topic was unfamiliar to most of the participants and that the interaction between them would facilitate engagement and exchange of ideas (Tracy, 2013: 167).
Our working assumption was that demographic characteristics affect the questions at hand. The issues pertain to the extent to which people are minded about their imminent death and what they leave behind. Accordingly, we viewed age as an important factor along with the scope of users’ current online activities and interactions, implying digital literacy. Also, users’ prior experience of loss and coping with loss were critical, given our hypothesis that exposure to these issues may have shaped perceptions and behaviors. Additional demographic characteristics, such as marital status, parenthood, and religious or ethnic background, could be relevant. We conducted eight FGs with the following profiles:
FG1: adults in their late 20s and early 30s, most without children (10 participants)
FG2: young adults, aged 18 to mid-20s, with no children (9 participants)
FG3: adults in their 60s and older, with children and grandchildren (6 participants)
FG4: adults in their 30s and 40s, with children (9 participants)
FG5: adults in their 60s and older, with children and grandchildren (10 participants)
FG6: Arab participants of various ages and marital statuses (10 participants)
FG7: adults in their 30s and 40s, with children (8 participants)
FG8: bereaved family members in their 30s and 40s, with most having lost a sibling (5 participants).
The total number of participants was 67, all Israeli citizens: 57 were Jewish and 10 were Christian or Muslim, reflecting the geographic and demographic diversity of the Israeli population. The sample comprised 40 women and 27 men. Participants were recruited by a research firm that specializes in social research. The in-person meetings were co-moderated by the firm’s representative and the authors in public or educational venues in different locales in Israel between February and July 2019. Participants were granted vouchers for their participation.
All participants signed an informed consent form before commencing the discussion. The research was approved by the human subject ethics committee of the second author’s institution.
The FGs’ protocol included questions related to online practices, then progressed to digital remains, asking about the users’ experiences and thoughts. We presented various scenarios, as well as Facebook’s Legacy Contact and Google’s Inactive Account Management tools.
The FGs lasted about 1.5 hours each and were recorded and transcribed. Each author reviewed the transcriptions independently and suggested themes. We then compared these and focused on the participants’ normative stance regarding access to digital remains. The analysis scheme differentiated between Internet use, perceptions of privacy and posthumous privacy, attitudes toward death, behavior related to accessing digital remains, and mourning and commemoration practices.
Findings
Posthumous impression management online
Although not phrased in academic terms, participants in all groups agreed that impression management also transpires posthumously (see also Fordyce et al., 2021) and that managing access to personal data is crucial in this regard. Some participants described their online persona in ways that resonate with Goffman’s backstage metaphor:
I think that the offline and the online worlds are two different things. What happens online, in the digital world, is different, often much different, from the person I am in everyday life . . . Generally speaking, many people hide in the digital realm and present something that is not them. And this is not something I want people to find out after I pass away. (Karen, FG8)
2
Participants in other groups described similar practices of keeping private information for themselves and not sharing it, even with close social circles. In Goffman’s terms, these participants created a record of their performance but kept it from the audience’s sight. They did not wish this information to move frontstage or to be presented to an audience posthumously.
Some participants expressed discontent regarding cases where private people’s private correspondence was made public, even if the new information was revealed for arguably positive purposes. They recalled a book about a terror victim published after her death, based on her private digital correspondence with others. Participants believed that even if the publication served the deceased’s reputation, no one had a right to publish it. Note that these comments did not refer to how the victim’s image was constructed (unlike the case of Zyzz, see Nansen et al., 2016) but to the very publication of her private letters. Participants argued that it was impossible to determine which information would cast a positive light on the deceased and which would result in the opposite. Accordingly, their normative stance was that if the information was not shared while alive, it needed to be locked forever. This position reflects a principle of continuity of digital remains: posthumously maintaining the deceased user’s online preferences during their lifetime. The argument for continuity was raised concerning both positive and negative information. Participants were concerned that a release of heretofore unknown information would distort the image of the deceased among their acquaintances, and the respondents disapproved of using such information to praise the dead. Participants advocated for the deceased’s ability to shape their posthumous impression and privacy management.
Thus, a critical concern raised by many participants was uncontrolled information disclosure that would interfere with the presentation of self the deceased invested in during their lives. This raises questions of posthumous privacy, including the difference between the digital situation and the offline case, which we will address later. We anchor the discussion in posthumous impression management, which the participants associated with respecting the deceased’s will.
Respecting ante-mortem choices
In the FGs, the discussion concerning posthumous impression management was often framed in terms of respect toward the dead. A consensus among the participants held that the information circulated about the dead posthumously should not harm their good name and should not interfere with the public persona they established and maintained during their lives. Thus, participants associated impression management with human dignity—the individual’s right to author their own life story and present the social persona they wished to portray. The participants held that the person’s human dignity was violated when information about the self is revealed without the person’s consent and when this information undermines the social persona the person had cultivated:
At the end of the day, it all comes down to one thing—respect: respect for the dead. And this is also part of our Jewish tradition … Eventually, it is associated with respecting those who are no longer here with us. (Ruth, FG8)
This approach was reiterated by several participants in all the FGs. Some participants expressed their interest in accessing dead people’s personal information, and some acknowledged doing so in some cases. For example, a participant in FG5 admitted to reading personal emails of her deceased brother. Others said they avoided such access to respect the dead:
I wish I could consume all the information [the deceased left behind—authors], yet at the same time, I want to respect the dead. (Jane, FG7)
Participants in several groups expressed concerns about the inability of the dead to control the flow of information and the fear that embarrassing or secret information that was kept private might surface. Participants recognized people’s efforts to manage their impression when they were alive. Yet, they also acknowledged that everyone has done or said things that can contaminate their social persona. Out of respect to the dead, and given the deceased’s inability to respond to harmful information, participants expressed discomfort were such information to surface:
If a [private] profile of a person who worked hard to project a positive character becomes public, and people will be exposed to these aspects of his personality, that would seem to me to be morally flawed. (Eve, FG4)
Thus, personal information was associated with the person’s right to control their personal narrative and with a societal duty to respect the data-related decisions data subjects made during their lifetime.
Managing the dead’s reputation
In contemporary Israeli society, respect and human dignity are often associated with the right to a good name. Participants were concerned that the deceased’s reputation would be harmed due to their inability to control access to their digital remains. Thus, participants believed that information that was not publicly accessible prior to death should remain as such—this is the continuity principle of digital remains. Various participants expressed discomfort that private information might leak, intuitively realizing the radical context collapse described earlier, thus altering the deceased’s public image among family and friends, even if such information was accurate. Participants welcomed their blissful ignorance—being unaware of a deceased’s actions or views—which would protect the deceased’s good name and honor their memory. This blissful ignorance would also serve as a protective mechanism for themselves, avoiding exposure to any new information that could ruin their image of the deceased:
It frightens me to find some information that is the opposite of what I knew—I don’t want to know! (Eve, FG4) I have an image of my father, a figure I know, of whom I hold a particular opinion. I wouldn’t like to learn new information about him that I don’t already know. What I know is fine. (David, FG7)
Some participants believed that family members could serve as trustees and act on behalf of the deceased user and make decisions regarding access to private information:
You know the person, and you were connected, so you can know, more or less, what they would have wanted. I also guess that these topics come up in conversations from time to time, so based on how well you know the person, you can tell what they would have wanted others to see. (Sarah, FG5)
However, the wish to protect the deceased’s reputation was often an effort to preserve the family’s reputation, represented and disguised as the deceased’s privacy. The concern was that uncovering the deceased’s concealed information would shame the family:
If, for example, a son of an ultra-orthodox family dies, and images of him using drugs pop up, the parents would be ashamed. (Adam, FG4)
In other words, protecting the deceased’s reputation can sometimes serve as a proxy for family wishes and their efforts to maintain their own reputation or secure the commemoration of the dead. Their desire is that information they cannot control or cannot anticipate will never become public. Under this approach, the deceased’s interests and their family’s interests align.
On the contrary, some participants believed they were authorized to pry into their deceased family member’s accounts and described how they did it. One participant said she was very curious about her late brother’s life, and after he died, she and his son snooped into the accounts and read some intimate messages. The son felt uncomfortable doing so, but she had no problem with it. Another participant admitted accessing his late brother’s social account, where he found messages sent by the brother’s girlfriend after he died as a way to deal with her loss.
Planning ahead—thinking how others will remember us
Not all participants were minded to the possibility that their digital remains would shape their own posthumous impression management or how their digital remains would shape the ways others would remember them. The issue became more evident when the moderators raised it in the discussion. Some participants explained their avoidance of this matter, preferring to focus on expressing themselves in the here and now and not be distracted by considering how their online actions would be perceived after they die:
You can’t think of something you write right now and how it will be perceived if something terrible happens … When you write a post, when you post it, you don’t think about what you’ll leave behind. You write about something you love, connect with, or believe in. (Sharon, FG2)
This approach captures the focus on the here and now in social networks that urge their users to share the moment. Death and post-mortem-ness interfere with this state of mind.
In contrast, in two FGs—FG3 (participants aged 60+) and FG8 (relatives of deceased users)—participants were more minded about their own potential death, more aware of what they would leave behind, and concerned with who might have access to their digital remains. Some bereaved siblings shared with us that, in light of their loss experience, they remind themselves to keep a record of activities and events that would inform how others will remember them:
When I look back at pictures of my deceased brother, I often think it was good that I insisted on taking his photo then. And drawing on that, when I travel, it is critical to me to take photos so I can remember these places, but also to leave potential digital remains. (Tanya, FG8)
In FG3, participants discussed the information they wished to leave for their loved ones and what preparations they made to facilitate their own commemoration. One participant said he had established a physical folder containing documents he wanted his family to keep and review during the Shiva, the 7 days of mourning in Jewish tradition (Jake, FG3).
In other groups, younger participants were less minded about this issue. However, once the moderators introduced it, participants noted that they would be more active and rearrange access to material they deem sensitive. This leads us to the fundamental question of posthumous privacy and posthumous impression management.
Does privacy survive death?
Forming social norms regardless of legal regulation
Unaware of the legal status of posthumous privacy and the debate among legal scholars on the optimal manner to regulate it if at all (Harbinja, 2017; Rycroft, 2020; Schafer, 2021), participants expressed independent views on the matter. Most were unacquainted with the legal stance on posthumous privacy (unclear in Israeli law), formulating their own, sometimes fresh and unsubstantiated, stance. The articulated positions were not always solid or coherent, and they sometimes shifted as the discussion progressed and more perspectives were aired. This fuzziness is an important finding in itself, as it reflects a social attitude toward death—repression and possible denial. Even though death has been around forever and social networks have become commonplace for more than a decade, it seems as if the general public has yet to consider questions of access to digital remains (see also Digital Death Report, 2018; Morse and Birnhack, 2022).
The most common social stance was that privacy survives death and that people’s private information needs to be respected, even after death. Regardless of the digital aspect of this matter, some participants associated privacy with secrecy, putting it quite bluntly: “Some things should be buried with us. They should follow us to the grave” (Daniel, FG2). Another participant mentioned a deceased Israeli singer whose wife made his handwritten diaries public after he died—“I believe that morally, this is not OK. We need to respect his privacy posthumously” (Eve, FG4). Another participant formulated a clear hierarchy: “Privacy trumps everything, even commemoration” (Ruth, FG7).
This rationale was applied to posthumous privacy in the digital age. Karen, in her 30s, explained,
Today, most of our memories, like, most of our personal stuff, are stored here [pointing to her mobile device]. It is all here or online. The personal information is mine, and I don’t want other people to read it. I wouldn’t want other people to be exposed to it. It’s mine. (Karen, FG8)
Chris (FG6), in his 20s, articulated a firm stance: As long as he did not make his personal information public, no one should access it:
This is my privacy. It doesn’t matter if I left a will. If I did not make the information public in the first place, don’t touch it. Absolutely, don’t touch it!
Note that Chris separated the normative stance on access to digital remains from the legal status of writing a will. For him, composing a will does not grant permission to access digital remains. He further asserted that the status of the data—whether public or private—should freeze upon death. Other participants alluded to this view that the privacy status of various pieces of information needs to extend from life to after death. This is a clear reflection of the continuity principle.
Relinquishing informal access
Some bereaved siblings shared their personal experiences accessing digital remains and their decision to leave them untouched. Ruth (FG8), whose brother died in military combat, described her dilemma in dealing with her brother’s laptop. She realized that the browser saved his Facebook password, yet she refrained from logging in to his account: “I didn’t dare to do it. Morally, I felt I could not invade his private space—this is his place.” Another participant who lost her brother in similar circumstances said she had no dilemma:
I did not ponder this and didn’t need to think about it. I cannot breach his private space. His Facebook and Instagram accounts are his, and I can’t run them for him. Our correspondence—IMs and voicemails and other things he shared with me were stored on my device—these I kept. (Karen, FG8)
Thus, aligning with what we saw earlier, some participants contended that a person’s privacy should be respected posthumously. This stance resonates with scholars’ approach that views privacy as exercising control over personal information (Westin, 1967), extending it posthumously. A dominant thread in privacy theories bundles privacy with human dignity and points to a person’s right to control which personal data are shared with whom, when, and how. The data subject’s decision regarding sharing personal data should be respected, and respecting one’s privacy, for that matter, is respecting one’s human dignity. Although these theories of privacy are applied to living subjects, the participants in the FGs intuitively articulated their moral stance on posthumous privacy in a similar vein. They associated the exercise of control over personal data with respecting the dead. Given the social value of respecting the dead, participants opined that society must maintain the deceased’s wishes regarding access to their digital remains. In other words, they rejected the surrogate model (Fordyce et al., 2021) in the absence of consent.
Public information and content
As for public data, participants maintained that if content was shared publicly during the deceased’s lifetime, it should not become private posthumously. One participant (Debby, FG3) shared a story about someone she knew whose public blog posts were removed from the platform after his death (like Alice’s scenario), an expungement of which she disapproved. She believed that once the information was public, it had to remain forever accessible, and that the platform should not limit access to public posts after the author’s death. It is noteworthy that the discussions did not address scenarios in which old posts may obtain new meaning as time passes and harm the deceased’s reputation.
On the contrary, some participants presented an alternative approach, that privacy expired upon death. Some younger participants believed that their parents should be able to access their private digital zones posthumously to enable them to know their children better:
I don’t share everything with my parents. I don’t believe there is even one person here in the room who shares everything with their parents. But at the end of the day, I believe my parents should have access to who I was, to who I am. (Nicole, FG2)
Phrased in Goffman’s terms, this view states that upon death, the partition that demarcates the frontstage and the backstage should be lifted or removed.
Some elder participants said that they keep some data private now—things they do not wish to share with their children during their life—but upon death, they would want this information to be accessible to their children.
There are things about myself that I want my daughters to find out after I die, that I wish to “bequeath” to them so they could use them in their own lives. But I want them to have it only after I die. I want to ensure they could easily find this information after I die. (Becky, FG3)
This approach contends that personal data should not become orphaned and that the next of kin should be able to access private information posthumously. However, this approach encapsulates a subtle grain of control: The data-subject desires that private, “backstage” information be shared with particular audiences posthumously. This is a qualification of the continuity principle, echoing Charlie’s scenario.
The platform is the message—forming social norms
Given that digital remains, as their name suggests, remain after death, and the deceased can no longer control accessibility, how can one know which data need to remain private and which can become public? Many participants considered the medium or the platform to be an indication or a proxy for determining the data’s status. Participants argued that one-on-one conversations, such as Facebook’s Messenger or WhatsApp messages, should remain private. On the contrary, one-to-many forms of communication, like Facebook posts, were considered “public” and hence, should retain their public status posthumously:
One-on-one WhatsApp messaging is out of the question. Totally off limit. If I posted something on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, I don’t really care if it reached 1,000 “friends” or 20,000. But if I corresponded [with someone] on WhatsApp, I never intended it to go public. … [it] needs to remain private. (Adam, FG4)
Studies have shown that users do not perceive platforms such as Facebook as a single platform but as multiple sub-platforms that they employ for distinct purposes (Navon and Noy, 2021). Individuals use Facebook’s features and affordances to facilitate different levels of engagement and create separate contexts, including posthumously. In this regard, the status of information is determined according to the sub-platform’s features: Public posts are public, and messenger chats are private. Participants explained this distinction according to their understanding of the technology’s architecture. One participant used an offline analogy:
I wouldn’t want anybody to unlock a drawer in my room. If you lock stuff in a drawer, you do it for a reason. I wouldn’t want anybody to unlock it. (Joel, FG2)
In other words, the message about the status of information—whether it can be released and shared—is to be found in the nature of the medium: If it is locked, it is private and should remain that way. These views seem to idealize locks, which can be broken offline and extends this ideal view online.
Other participants expressed similar views. They contended that the original context should prevail and that the communication platform is integral to the context. Accordingly, information needs to be confined to the context from which it emerged in terms of the audience and the impression it fostered. This approach resonates with Goffman’s theory that only the creator of the content can choose whether and how to re-contextualize information. It also resonates with Nissenbaum’s (2009) theory of contextual integrity, which anchors the original context in which information was generated and circulated. A posthumous circulation of information that had been considered private violates this principle.
Participants in multiple groups suggested an exception to the continuity principle: Since personal data of deceased users are an important component for commemoration, and since the original context of the information should be respected, access to digital remains should be acquired through social channels. We term this social access. Accordingly, if the deceased person’s family and friends wish to access private information that had not been shared with them, they should approach other acquaintances that had received this information from the deceased and request they share it with them. For example, if parents wish to access photos of their deceased child not shared with them during the child’s life, they should contact their child’s friends and request them to share the content. The assumption is that human mediation does not breach privacy, even though contextual integrity is violated. Accordingly, human mediation—rather than direct digital access—is perceived as legitimate since these acquaintances can apply a layer of discretion that respects the deceased’s privacy. This social access grants the human mediator permission to act on behalf of the dead. Respecting privacy by involving a mediator is a nuanced version of Fordyce et al.’s (2021) surrogacy model, which approves a bypass of information flow from one frontstage to another in the absence of explicit permission to reveal backstage information posthumously.
Discussion
This analysis identified perceptions and normative stances regarding posthumous privacy and management of access to digital remains that advocate for the posthumous extension of ante-mortem impression management and privacy settings. This is the continuity principle of digital remains, encapsulated in Diana’s scenario. Participants in the FGs believed a person’s decisions concerning sharing information must be respected after death, even though the data subject can no longer control their personal data. These perceptions align with Birnhack’s (2016) circles of privacy and Nissenbaum’s (2009) contextual integrity, which most participants believed should linger after death, resonating with arguments about posthumous privacy (Harbinja, 2017). Most participants distinguished between how users managed their personal information in public versus private spheres and favored extending these distinctions posthumously. Participants contended that individuals’ autonomy should be respected regarding how they chose to share and circulate personal data. Current digital media allow users to choose with whom to share which pieces of information. Thus, if information was circulated within social circles that the users selected and controlled, the information flow was considered legitimate. These participants suggested that these boundaries should be maintained posthumously, thus rejecting both Alice and Bob’s scenarios.
We called this approach the continuity principle. Regardless of the stances on posthumous privacy, and despite the lack of sufficient attention to managing digital remains, several insights were reflected prominently in the FGs: (1) users have expectations for posthumous privacy; (2) society should acknowledge and respect posthumous privacy; (3) technology should facilitate meeting these expectations; and (4) the boundaries of access to personal data that were established in life should persist posthumously.
The continuity principle we identified reflects the individualistic understanding of privacy. However, a recent thread in privacy literature has highlighted the social aspects of privacy (e.g. Cohen, 2012; Viljoen, 2021). The social access we described here bestows consideration on the deceased’s social circles and grants them permission to act on behalf of the deceased to re-distribute the information that was shared with them. Participants recognized the deceased’s acquaintances as social trustees of the dead, authorized to consider how data are distributed in new circumstances. This stance is the most proximate to Charlie’s scenario, reflecting mediated and nuanced access.
Participants were not unanimous regarding posthumous privacy and managing access to digital remains. Elderly participants who were digitally savvy and younger (arguably “digital native” participants who had experienced a loss of a sibling) were more cognizant of the issues at hand and were more minded in their everyday life about the content they would leave upon death. This mind-set and behavior enable them to control their posthumous impression management.
Conclusion
Life in the digital age entails constant negotiations of social norms in various aspects of life and after death. The rise of digital technologies documenting social interactions in everyday life results in an unprecedented mass of personal data that the dead leave behind. The living managed their data to express and exhibit the personality they chose to foster for their various social circles. After death, the data may serve the commemoration of the deceased by their family and friends. This situation requires rethinking and shaping social norms about the role of digital technologies in facilitating social interactions posthumously.
This study utilized Goffman’s theoretical framework of impression management to decipher the digital posthumous condition. The findings suggest that privacy and impression management practices face new challenges in light of the deceased’s digital footprint and options to access the digital remains. However, users opine that in-life norms and choices should persist and survive death. This is the continuity principle: It is a social-normative stance that advocates for fortifying representations of self in line with a person’s in-life performances. When there are tensions between users’ ante-mortem privacy wishes and family’s wishes and interests after the person’s death, the continuity principle opts for the user’s own wishes, as evident from his or her ante-mortem online behavior.
The discussion points to several research avenues: A cultural comparison may assess whether the continuity principle is universal or cultural-contingent; a longitudinal research may indicate whether the continuity principle persists when technological options for managing digital remains change. Finally, a policy-anchored study may examine how Internet policies may best reflect the continuity principle.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation (ISF) (Grant number 257/18).
