Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Post-Mortem Digital Governance
Digital Remains
Sociotechnical Systems
Content Analysis
Access Control Framework
Who Acts When the User Is Gone? Digital Remains, Survivor Claims, and Post-Mortem Governance
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the absence of governance frameworks for digital legacies after a user’s death and the coordination difficulties faced by bereaved survivors. Through a multidimensional content analysis of 800 Reddit posts, it investigates sociotechnical collaboration and conflict surrounding post-mortem digital privacy and security. The findings reveal the critical role of devices as access gateways and identify data loss as a primary harm. Building on these insights, the authors construct a post-mortem digital governance framework organized along dimensions such as assets and actors. This framework establishes a foundation for mechanism design to support survivor coordination, thereby bridging significant theoretical and practical gaps in the field of digital legacy governance.
📝 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.
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