Digital accounts and devices face complex access issues after death
Who Acts When the User Is Gone? Digital Remains, Survivor Claims, and Post-Mortem Governance
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
When someone dies, their digital stuff—like phones, accounts, and photos—still exist online or on devices. The authors looked at posts on Reddit to understand who tries to access these digital remains and what difficulties they face. They found that devices often unlock access to many other digital assets, and people connected to the deceased make most attempts to manage these accounts. The study highlights that losing valuable data is a big problem and suggests ways to create systems that help survivors work together while protecting privacy.
What this means in practice
- •For platform security teams: Improve account recovery policies for deceased users by understanding survivor access needs and privacy tensions after death.
- •For digital estate planners: Design tools that help survivors coordinate access to digital assets while respecting privacy and limiting unauthorized use.
Authors
Supriya Khadka, Dhiman Goswami, Sanchari Das
Abstract
Digital systems continue to govern accounts, devices, data, and recovery channels after an account holder dies, leaving survivors to manage digital remains through mechanisms built around a living user. We examine post-mortem digital governance as a sociotechnical problem of cooperative and contested work, focusing on who acts when the user is gone, what claims they make, and what barriers shape recovery, preservation, closure, and protection. We conducted a content analysis of $800$ Reddit posts about post-mortem digital privacy and security, coding posts across assets, actors, actions, privacy tensions, access barriers, policy gaps, emotional contexts, and risks. Findings show that phones/devices often act as gateways to other digital remains, socially connected actors make most claims, and data loss emerges as a central harm. We synthesize these findings into a Post-Mortem Digital Governance Framework for designing mechanisms that support survivor coordination while limiting access by purpose, asset, actor, and context.