The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care [Hardcover]

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place onlinebut what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to interact with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl ?hman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our ownand if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanitythe first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyonepast, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, ?hman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change,The Afterlife of Datawill be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital pastbefore it is too late.

Carl ?hmanis assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University, Sweden.