Life After Death, Online

836 Words2 Pages

A. Presentation of the issue.

Online data has always created different social issues among society, as more and more people join the on-line networks and change from physical to online data more problems arise. We all focus on the issues we have to face now, however people input more and more information into the cloud, photos, passwords, bank accounts and online status every day. So what happens to all this digital data once the people die? Online privacy once a person dies has brought different issues into society, especially to the closest relatives (Lee,2010). This is a very grey area of the internet because there are no implemented laws and few protocols to follow. Should an account be left to the closest relative or to an already determined person, or should there exist some sort of internet will (Johnson,2011). Each year more than 280 thousand people check out of Facebook (Cate,2010), and each second 316 twitter accounts are created (Dugan,2011). So who is to decide what to do with it once the owner is gone? How can someone erase all the memories of a person? What if the data is special to someone else outside the close family circle? This is a very morbid issue because of the delicacy of the subject however users are not getting younger and more and more accounts are created each day.

B. The IT background of the issue.

There are several technologies that have lead to this issue. First we have the rapid increase in personal computers, plus the fact that nowadays a computer is as important as education, so more people are investing in one and accessing it to the internet is easier each time. User friendly social networks and cheap internet services contribute to huge amounts of data imputed to the cloud everyday by a spec...

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