What happens to your data when you die?

Franz Kafka died 100 years ago in literary obscurity. He had instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished works. Fortunately for generations of readers, Brod did not; he believed Kafka to be among the greatest writers of his time and instead edited and published his late friend’s writing. In other words, Brod decided that Kafka’s stories belonged not to the late author, but to the literate public.

Brod’s conundrum echoes today. People live online and generate far more data than they did just a decade ago. Everyone leaves digital traces behind when they die, either deliberately, in the form of social-media profiles and posts, or incidentally, with web searches, phone-location data, banking records and so on.

Unlike bodies, data do not decay. According to Carl Ohman, a Swedish political scientist, this condition makes the modern world “post-mortal”. “The dead remain there for us in a way that has not been possible in pre-digital society,” he observes. As a result, “Living in the post-mortal condition is to constantly find oneself in the shoes of Max Brod.”

The digital era has reshaped humans’ relationship with the dead—as anyone whose Facebook account has reminded them to say “happy birthday” to a late family member can attest. That sort of reminder would probably never have happened before social media, because everyone who knew that person’s birthday also would have known that he was dead. Such reminders are poised to grow more common: Mr Ohman’s research has found that, on Facebook, the dead may well outnumber the living within 40 years.

Sophisticated technology enables a continued, ersatz relationship with the dead. In 2022 Amazon announced that it was developing a feature so its virtual assistant, Alexa, could be programmed to speak in the voice of a dead relative. It even made a video in which a boy asks Alexa to read him “The Wizard of Oz” in his late grandmother’s voice.

Startups have used data to make chatbots of the deceased; no doubt more lifelike versions will come soon. Mr Ohman shrewdly points out that the chatbots will be designed to cement users’ commercial relationship with their creator firms and are thus unlikely to be grumpy, pick fights or do any of the countless irritating—but deeply human—things that people do over the course of long relationships.

At the root of this quirky but thoughtful book is a series of thorny philosophical questions. To whom do the dead’s data belong? Are data something people create, or something that, in a sense, they are—a digital analogue to a physical body? If data are a digital counterpart, what obligations does that impose on the living? After all, most cultures are averse to just leaving a dead body in the open to rot, even though it is no longer being used. Do data demand the same reverence?

These are not merely questions for individuals wondering what to do with their loved ones’ digital remains. They are questions for society at large. After all, historians often study the diaries of the dead. Their writers may have preferred to keep the contents private, but the light such documents can collectively shine on humanity’s past outweighs the late owner’s wishes. Mr Ohman notes that data constitute “the biggest archive of human behaviour in the history of our species”; data are therefore an irreplaceable, invaluable record for future generations. As this record is collective, concern for it should be, too. But working out precisely what that means in practice is tricky.

Not all data can be saved, and Mr Ohman never quite explains when to press “save” and when to hit “delete”. He asserts that “concrete prescriptions” for how to preserve the past are beyond the scope of his book. He urges users to pressure social-media firms “in terms of how they deal with digital remains”, again opting for exhortation at the expense of pragmatism and granularity. Still, by encouraging readers to think about what to do with digital corpses, so to speak, “The Afterlife of Data” deserves a long shelf life.

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