A term or concept · 2024 · AI
Digital orphans
The problem of personal data held for the dead, and of services continuing, changing or ending for people who can no longer consent.
A rights problem with no owner. Nobody is a legal person in a database, and the gap between the person who was and the account that persists is where the next twenty years of parasocial harm is going to live.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
2010 2010+ · 2024 2026
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- retrievableA distinct cohort follows from the same finding: children inheriting accounts managed by adults they did not choose, which turns a memorial profile into a custody decisionBrubaker, J. R., Hargittai, E., & Burgess, J. (2013). Beyond the Grave: The Use of Facebook After Death. Digital Journalism, 1(3), 341-361. ↗
Connected · 2 out, 2 in
The same feeling, largercites · 2023 · A term or conceptThe dead celebrity, generatedcites · 2024 · A mechanism or tacticThe dead celebrity, generatedcites · 2024 · A mechanism or tacticThe same feeling, largercites · 2023 · A term or concept
Reported as a story
Two women died in the same month and the discourse is about whether you are allowed to be sadDolly Parton and Gloria Steinem. One sang, one argued. Grief treated them identically and got accused of not knowing the difference.A study found AI updates can feel like breakupsResearchers asked people about model changes. The answer was loss, and they had a word for the shape of it.
It sits in