What Happens to Your Data When You Die

One of the best and most unsettling episodes of Netflix’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror is “Be Right Back,” which tells the story of a woman who loses her boyfriend in a car accident.

- By Courtney Linder

Can't Stop Thinking About

Rather than wade through the grieving process by looking at old photos, text messages, and social media posts, she uses her dead boyfriend’s data to create an AI version of him. The episode made my skin crawl, but got me thinking: Could my partner use my tweets and Facebook posts to build an AI avatar of me? And just what happens to all of our postmortem data, anyway?

In 2019 research published in the journal Big Data & Society, Carl Öhman, an associate senior lecturer with the department of government at Sweden’s Uppsala University, estimated that by the year 2100, there would be a minimum of 1.4 billion dead former Facebook users— assuming the platform ceased to attract new users after 2018 when he performed his analysis. If the social network continues to expand at its current pace, there could be in excess of 4.9 billion profiles for deceased persons by that time, he says.