Our digital legacy research investigates how to support users, especially older adults, in planning their digital legacy. A digital legacy is all of the digital information you leave behind: the accounts, files, emails, posts, photos, etc., and also the traces of your interactions, your ‘likes’ on social media, your chatGPT prompts, your shopping transactions, your trip history, the prescriptions you filled, etc. When you die, if you have not planned appropriately, all of these accounts, digital assets, and interaction traces become abandoned. That’s a problem: it can attract hackers, the information can be stolen, private information that you wouldn’t want shared can be made public or used to bribe your loved ones, or your accounts can be held hostage, requiring your loved ones to pay ransom to regain control.

It’s important to plan for the proper closing of your digital accounts and to decide what to do with your digital assets. Who should have access to them? Or do you want them deleted? If you think about all the digital accounts and assets you have, this could easily become overwhelming. What does the emergence of GenAI mean for our digital after-lives? Do you want to be represented as an AI DeadBot for your loved ones to converse with after you die?

In our work, we are investigating how to support users in planning and managing their digital legacies.

Resources

We have created a variety of tri-fold brochures that can help you learn what digital legacy planning is, and how to set up digital legacy contacts on common digital platforms. We also have brochures that explain how password managers can be used to assist with digital legacy management. Please feel free to download these and print and fold them. We hope you find these resources useful and we hope to add more in the future.

Digital Legacy Planning Brochure

Digital Legacy Contact Setup – Apple

Digital Legacy Contact Setup – Google

Digital Legacy Contact Setup – Meta (FB/Instagram)

Password Managers & Digital Legacy Planning

Password Manager Digital Legacy Contact Setup – LastPass

Several research projects we are conducting to explore this area of digital legacy management/planning are listed below, with more in the works. Stay tuned!

Digital Legacy Survey

This survey study allows any adults in Canada aged 18+ to provide input on digital legacy planning: how do you think about your digital legacy, what planning have you already done, how does your spirituality or family circumstances impact the way you think about what should happen to your digital assets after you die? If you are interested in participating or learning about the results, please visit the survey study web page.

Digital Directives Participatory Design Study

This study involves older adults working with us through focus groups and helping us to design a website that will allow people to create and download a digital directive. A digital directive is similar to a healthcare directive – it is a set of written instructions detailing who should manage a person’s digital accounts after death or incapacitation. We are designing this site with older adults to try to ensure that the site is usable by older adults, who are most likely to be thinking about legacy planning. To learn more about this project, please visit the digital directives design study web page.

Digital Death Directory

Which platforms have built-in settings or planning interfaces to help you direct what should happen to your account after you die? What are the policies of digital platforms about what they do with your data if your account becomes inactive? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a consumer reports-style web site where you can look up these policies and settings all in one place? We are working on it! Stay tuned!