Guidelines for human afterlife can be used for ‘digital remains’
Your internet activity – commonly referred to as “digital remains” – should be treated with the same care and respect as physical remains by using guidelines for human remains at archaeological exhibitions, according to new research at the University of Oxford.
Such internet activity lives on long after a person dies and firms such as Facebook and experimental start-ups have sought to monetise this content by allowing people to socialise with the dead online, via live stream funerals, online memorial pages and even chat bots that use people’s social media footprints to act as online ghosts.
“As a result, the digital afterlife industry (DAI) has become big business. However, in recent years the boundaries around acceptable afterlife activity and grief exploitation have become increasingly blurry,” the university said in a statement on the research published in the journal Nature.
So far, there has been little effort to build frameworks that ensure ethical usage of internet activity for commercial purposes.
But the study from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) suggests the guidelines used to manage human remains at archaeological exhibitions could be used as a framework to regulate the growing DAI industry, and make the commercial use of digital remains more ethical.
The study by Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information, and OII researcher Carl Öhman advises that online remains should be viewed as an extension of the human body, and treated with the same level of care and respect, rather than being manipulated for commercial gain.
The paper suggested that regulation is the best way to achieve this.
LONDON: