The cloud afterlife: Managing your digital legacy

Abstract

As technology has evolved, so too has the way which we store information: Simple items like photographs which, in the past we could have flicked through in a printed album, are now often only stored online. If they are not accessible online, they will therefore not be accessible at all once we are no longer around to locate them. This may have a psychological impact on the people we leave behind. In addition to the ethical concern, management of assets in the cloud is also a resource management challenge from the sustainability and environmental perspectives: As redundant data increasingly consumes resources, network sustainability becomes compromised. There is therefore an opportunity to optimize the process for the ethical, environmental, and sustainability implications of doing so. To determine the extent to which a problem exists both now and potentially in the future, we have conducted a survey to capture perceptions on cloud footprints in general, and the importance which people place on recovering digital assets from the cloud prior to death. Our results confirm that online users are generally unaware that this is an aspect which they should be considering in their estate planning - only 29% of respondents have considered what will happen their online data after death - but the majority agree that it is important and indicate that they will give it greater attention in the future.

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