The Digital Afterlife: An Inquiry into Digital Remains

As a work in progress, this paper will demonstrate the disturbing ambiguity concerning what happens to the colossal amount of digital remains—the photos, videos, and messages left behind by deceased internet users (Lingel, 2013) on online platforms. By describing the current state of scholarly inquiry into how digital remains are conceptualized, this paper will provide a preamble exploration of issues and ethical implications related to information privacy, digital dignity, and the potential commodification of digital remains (Karppi, 2013; Öhman & Floridi, 2017). This discussion aims to demonstrate that the data of the dead should be handled with dignity as a category of information that deserves protection. This protection is not for implicit harms against the information of the deceased, per se, but for the implications that any violation of this dignity imposes on surviving family and the larger community of mourners. Without effective policies and regulations that provide guidelines for service providers and internet users, the dead are not afforded rights to their privacy or digital dignity, nor is their postmortem data protected