MONTREAL—Over the past decade, many of us have created a virtual existence for ourselves online.
But what happens to that online life when real life ends?
It's a question that many people are now being to face.
Alison Atkins was young and beautiful, but behind her smile she suffered from colitis, a chronic disease that forced her to undergo several operations and be bedridden.
“She was constantly fighting pain,” said her father, Gary Atkins. “She was able to see what was going on. She met new people. She was actually counseling people who had the disease.”
Just 16, depressed and unable to go to school, the Toronto teenager started writing a blog and reached out to old friends and new on social media.
When Alison suddenly died last July her family wanted to know: Had the disease taken her or had she taken her own life?
“We were concerned about her state of mind and the first thing you want to do is look for answers,” said Gary.
Answers they thought might be found in her final dispatches from her computer. But without her passwords they couldn't access them until a family friend hacked in.
“She had the next five days of her life planned out. She had friends coming over, there was a party,” said Gary.
Alison's last on-line thoughts brought relief, she hadn't wanted to die and she’d been making plans to live. But they also gave her family something else, an insight into her virtual world, one they now wanted to keep.
They knew her now inactive social media accounts would soon be automatically shut down. Lost forever, like Alison.
“It wasn't that we wanted to go and log in and go through all of her private messages and post as her. It was just that we didn't want all those digital memories to be erased,” said her sister, Jaclyn Atkins.
“It was a better reminder that just going visit some gravestone that didn't really do anything,” echoed Gary. “It was just things that helped keep her alive for us.”
Facebook will memorialize the site of a user who's passed away if it's requested and if they receive a death certificate in the mail. But Atkins' sudden death forced her family to deal with a situation most of us have barely considered for ourselves: What happens to all our on-line existence after we've passed away?
“I kept seeing his profile pop up on my Twitter sidebar,” said Adele McAlear. She began thinking about all of this back in 2007 when someone she knew only on Twitter died.
“I started a conversation online and said, ‘What's going to happen to all of this?’ This is brave new world! What are we going to do with all of this now?” asked McAlear, a social media marketing consultant.
But few people bother reading all that fine print about who controls their digital legacy.
“Right now we have third party gate keepers who tell us what we can and cannot do with our online content,” said McAlear.
Those gatekeepers are the Twitters, Facebooks, Googles and Tumblrs of the world that each have their own policies about what they can do with your accounts when you're no longer there.
In the U.S. that battle over online content has already reached the courts.
When Justin Ellsworth, a U.S. Marine was killed in Iraq in 2004, his family fought to get all of his emails from Yahoo after his death.
“I don't think it's any different from the letters from soldiers from World War Two or Vietnam that the families have gotten and kept as keepsakes,” said his father, John Ellsworth.
A judge eventually granted the Ellsworth's access to the material, but on a CD.
“They were granted access to the contents of the account but not the account itself,” said McAlear.
Former Montrealer Jeremy Toeman has created a business that helps people plan ahead and avoid such disputes.
“I have my blog, I have my Twitter account, I have Facebook. All of these things are valuable in different ways,” said Toeman, the founder of Legacy Locker.
Valuable he says not only sentimentally but also financially, with accounts like eBay, Paypal. And even profits from on-line games like World of Warcraft and poker.
“Video game play can have value,” said Daniel Nelson, an estate lawyer who also happens to teach video game design. “30 years ago the things that we created were physical. It was a letter, written or typed or hand-written or a photo album. Now how many things do we create that are ever turned into real things?”
“It's a ticking time-bomb because digital assets are being created by young people and once they start to pass away that's going to become a problem. What happens to those assets?”
Tech expert Elias Makos knows first-hand how important all these discussions can be. After a good friend became terminally ill, she entrusted him with the passwords to her digital life.
“I think a lot of this, why it's such a big issue, is because it's an emotional issue,” said Makos. “I think people are going to have to start planning for the death in the digital world for how you want your digital life to be curated after you die.”
But the surest approach is to include your digital assets in your will.
“I know a lot of people want to keep their private lives private, even in their death,” said Makos.
On what would have been Alison's 17th birthday, the Atkins family held a very real gathering
They say they always wanted to respect their daughter's privacy, but gaining access to her online life has brought them peace of mind and more: A fuller understanding who she really was on Earth and online.
