what happens to your online information after death?

With almost everyone using internet and having considerable amount of data over the internet. Everyone wanting to have their presence felt over internet over various platforms. Its been a real question now “What exactly happens with our online information or the data which is saved over internet through social networking websites or email accounts after death?.”

With many companies providing access to cloud based services with some of them being free service providers the data which is kept over internet is huge now. Having said that the information could be photos, blogs, contacts, personal information, mails, chats, comments does defines your thoughts ,your virtual presence to the world and we need to value it.

So what happens to your information after death? Well different companies have different policies for these altogether, as Facebook’s policy allows your family to decide whether to deactivate, delete, download profile information, it also provides a very interesting feature of memorializing your profile as many people would still be wanting to remember you but your family would have to come up with your username and password or your death certificate. Whereas yahoo has a strict death policy where, upon receiving a copy of your death certificate they will permanently delete all of your accounts and their contents meaning no one but you can ever access them.

Definitely your family or relatives will have access to your online information provided they satisfy conditions & policies set by online service providers with related documents and necessary details. Internet archiving would be a boon for this as it allows you to archive web pages which are not password protected and which are publicly available.