How many dead people are on the internet?

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1:09Oh, interesting. Sometimes the most fascinating questions come from the simplest conversations. Ah, very astute. How did you come up with that idea? You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I'm Anand Jagatia, and this is the show which takes your questions to experts around the world to find answers. Oh, that's very clever. And this might be one of our tiniest listeners yet. This is Emmanuel, or Manu for short, and his dad, Devin, in Vancouver in Canada. He's three months old as of yesterday. He's just chattering all day. All he wants to do is make eye contact and have a nonsense conversation with you.

1:55What a poetic way of putting that. Although Manu is a brand new human who has just been born, his arrival got Devin wondering about death. After my son was born, I did the usual stuff, got him a library card, started filling out his passport application, and then I realised he's probably going to need an email. And I thought, why don't I hop on it? And pretty much every combination of his name that I could think of, I was unable to find it. first name, last name, and then I tried first name, dot, last name, first name, middle name, middle name, last name. None of them came up unless I started using random strings of letters and numbers.

2:33I even specifically gave him a unique middle name so that he would be easy to differentiate. So his name is Emmanuel Chaos. And it turns out that's already taken. My question for CrowdScience is how much of the internet is being taken up by dead people? like all of the email accounts, social media, sitting there collecting junk mail and storing information. I'm sure there are lots of accounts out there for people who have died and then they just get forgotten about. And I guess they're just sort of taking up space, right? And I think it's not even dead people. They're just dead accounts. I've got email addresses that I can't even remember that, you know, when you create to just sign on to a kind of sketchy website, especially in the earlier days when online shopping was less secure.

3:21And then I've got all my email accounts from universities. That is true. I guess I've just actually not thought about them for years, but the first email accounts I ever set up with really cheesy user names, I can't even remember what they would have been. We've sort of got this trail that we leave behind us on the internet of things that we used and don't use anymore. And it's just there for no reason, stuff that nobody wants or will ever look at. So how many dead people are there on the internet? What a great question. Thanks, Devin. To find out the answer, we need to understand what happens to our online selves when our physical selves pass away.

4:00If I drop dead tomorrow, would the big tech companies somehow know? Would my email account get archived? Would my social media accounts get flagged as inactive. How long would it be before my entire online presence, my whole digital self, just got deleted? So the big tech companies, the giants such as Google, Meta, Apple, don't routinely delete the deceased account. Most deceased users' profiles will remain there. Edina is a lawyer in the UK and an expert in what happens to your online remains after you die. So I'm Dr Idina Herbinya, Associate Professor of Technology Law at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham Law School.

4:46And my niche area of research is digital death or the post-mortem rights of individuals. So when you talk about somebody's digital death and the remains that they leave behind in a digital form, what kind of stuff are we talking about here? So there's loads of stuff now. This has grown exponentially over the last decade. In my PhD, for example, my case studies were online games, emails, and social networks. At that time, Facebook was the most popular one. So that's now ancient because only older people like myself use Facebook nowadays. So since then, this has grown to include various other social networks that have emerged and also private communications in emails and messages.

5:32a Gen AI survey such as ChatGPT or others. So how many of these different accounts will survive your death? Well, it turns out most tech companies have something called inactivity clauses built into their terms and conditions. You know, those really long things that you never read. Don't worry, though, we've read them for you, and we've learned that Google reserves the right to delete your account if you haven't used it for two years. X, formerly Twitter, says that they can do the same thing if you haven't logged in for 30 days, while Facebook actually says that they'll never delete an account.

6:09In fact, Adina says that in practice, most of the big tech companies just don't delete accounts. What happens though if you want your account deleted after you die? Well, lots of them do offer that option if you can find it buried in the settings. So for example, there is a Facebook legacy contact where an individual can nominate a contact that will handle the content after they die. There's Apple legacy content with a similar. So that means that you can basically say that when I die, I want this person to have access to my account and they can control what happens to it. Yes, yes. And then this legacy content will be able to decide whether to turn the page into a memorial or deactivate, delete, etc.

6:55Google's service called Inactive Account Manager has existed for now, I think, more than 10 years, whereas users can indicate a period of inactivity after which the service will be triggered. And one option is to have all of your data with Google deleted, but also a person can nominate beneficiaries who will get some of the content, let's say your photos in the cloud or some of your videos in YouTube or whatever. Of course, a service like this is only useful if people know it exists. we've done some empirical research on that a couple of years ago and of course the results were that people have never heard of most of these services it's not in the favor of a platform that sells communication closeness connections to remind users of their mortality no that's a very good point i mean to be honest i think anyone who has had to try and gently cajole a loved one to like think about maybe writing a will will know that like people just don't want to think about this stuff, right?

7:56Like nobody wants to die. And even for physical things or like, you know, your house or like your bank accounts, you probably haven't really thought as much as you should about what will happen to that when you die, let alone all of your digital assets. Yes, yes, exactly. So less than I think 20 % of users have even heard of that and let alone used. We suspect that it's probably single digits in terms of percents who actually activate and use these services. So if you die, when you die, the tech companies won't necessarily delete your account. And if you haven't assigned one of these legacy contacts, and let's face it, you probably haven't, then the account will remain as it is.

8:40Your loved ones will remain locked out of it. If they want access, it's likely they'd have to undergo a long and potentially painful legal proceeding. You would have to provide a death certificate and proof of a relationship in some cases. In other cases, you would need a court order, which again is very difficult and inaccessible for people. So have there been any examples then where people have managed to access someone's account after they died? Yes. So in 2015, in London, a woman called Rachel Thompson started the court process to access her deceased partner's Apple account that included family photos that she wanted to access for obviously very personal reasons of preserving the memory of her dead husband.

9:28She of course first contacted Apple to gain access through the company however they refused this access so she had to go through a very lengthy court process that lasted for about three years until the Central London County Court ordered Apple to provide access for her and her children. For me, what was interesting and important is that the judge in this case also called for law reform because they also thought that clear legal principles are needed to be able to handle these cases better and to avoid companies behaving basically as they wish in a lot of these cases. Even though the internet has been around for decades, this is all pretty new territory, legally speaking.

10:16Adina says that the systems we do have for dealing with your physical stuff after you die just kind of fall apart if you apply them to a TikTok account or an AI chat log or an online gaming profile. There's this qualitative difference between what we had before in the analogue or physical world. But nowadays, this has changed. And the law needs to account for that and needs to follow this technological leap, especially now with AI. If you had a grandparent who died, and they had a load of photos and some letters from decades ago, you'd probably go through those letters. And that's kind of quite straightforward.

10:53But then when you're talking about somebody's entire digital footprint, including their emails, their social media accounts, what they've said to a chatbot. Isn't there a tension there between giving the family access to those things so that they don't just get deleted, but also respecting the privacy wishes of the person who's passed away? Yes, so the analogy that you made is one that's used quite a lot in conversations around this. So should we treat emails or online digital photos the same that we treated physical letters before and physical photos? And I think the sensible answer is no, because previously the access to that physical material was quite straightforward.

11:35Whoever had the possession of the physical artifact also had the possession of whatever is in it, communications letters, secrets, etc. What has changed with the internet is this introduction of the gatekeeper. so we can't just now access someone's letters because we would first have to access their account and it's not guaranteed that this access will be granted. I can confidently say that there isn't a single country in the world that has a comprehensive framework for dealing with digital remains. But Idina is aiming to change all this. And in July 2026, along with colleagues, she published a brand new set of model rules, which are designed to establish some clear guidance on how the law and big tech companies ought to deal with digital death.

12:27It's the first of its kind, and Adina hopes to take these rules to Brussels and start the long process of getting them made into European law. We provide for mechanisms with regards to personal digital remains that could be then translated into legislation. So it's like a blueprint for legislators. First, they think that if you write a digital will, a document that explains who you want to get what when you die, that it should be legally binding. The first rule is that the deceased autonomy should be respected at all times. And if the deceased has decided that some of that should be deleted or left to someone, the law needs to respect and enforce those decisions.

13:11If you say in your digital will that you want your emails to go to your children, your Reddit account to go to your best friend, and your online dating account to be immediately destroyed, tech companies would have to respect that. If there is no such a decision, we've envisaged limited access rights by heirs and family members. They won't inherit personal digital remains. They would just have the right to access it for 10 years after death. And that access will mean deletion, modification, download. And again, tech companies are not allowed to delete this material for 10 years. And after 10 years, these remains will be deleted.

13:50But after a decade, whatever's left is erased. Permanently. We still have a lot of work to do to convince legislators that this is a priority and needs to become the law. But at least, you know, there is something more comprehensive to what we have at the moment. So if our digital remains are not routinely deleted by the tech companies who own them, then it's a fairly safe bet that a huge number of them are still out there online. But of course, inactive doesn't mean invisible. And these dead accounts can still feel powerfully alive to the people left behind. And that's where we're going. september's always busy whole foods market can help their september stock up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful nourishing food even better there are hundreds of sales get dinner going with canned soups and veggies lean on frozen pizzas pastas and seafood everyone loves their build your own family meals feeds four for just 35 dollars stock up at whole foods market.

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15:33Next.

15:40You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I'm Anand Jagatia, and this week we're going beyond the digital veil to bring back answers from the online afterlife. What happens to your internet self when you die? We've discovered that accounts aren't usually deleted. So what does happen to them? Well, very often they carry on as if nothing has changed at all. My estranged father actually passed away in December 2022. I had my two weeks of grieving. We buried him back in Cabo Verde, where I'm from. Then there was a moment I woke up in the morning and I was like, let me log into Facebook because I haven't done that in years.

16:30So I did the whole ritual of remembering my password, typing it in. And then the moment I got in, I found years of messages coming from my father in my inbox that I had not seen.

16:49It was incredible because it was almost like he'd come back to life in a strange way, but at the same time you felt the absence. So it was like a sort of grief, I think, that none of us are really prepared for. A kind of grief, yeah, estrangement and grief. I felt like I was interacting with a ghost, yeah.

17:19My name is Janille de Bartlomeu and I'm based in Rotterdam. I'm an artist, filmmaker and researcher. How did finding all of these messages affect the way that you dealt with your father's death? These messages broke something open that could only be dealt with through my work and through images, I think. I couldn't find the words for it. I couldn't find any other way to deal with it. Janilda is an artist. She's turned the emotional experience of encountering her father's digital ghost into an artwork. I'm sitting next to Janilda on a bench at Impact, a gallery and centre for media culture in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

18:12It's before the gallery has opened to the public, and we're watching her film play on a screen in front of us. As I'm a filmmaker, I've usually worked a lot with the camera before, but this time I decided to work with a different medium, which is a desktop film. The film is a recording of Janilda's computer desktop. It's weirdly intimate, like looking into her mind in real time. It's messy, there are about a million different tabs open, there are half-finished research projects and documents all over the screen, and you see her struggle to log in to her long-forgotten Facebook account. She gets her password wrong a few times, and then she logs in.

18:54And all these messages from her dead father are suddenly right there. I just screen-recorded coincidentally. You see all my tabs open, because I was already thinking about a digital project, and then I came across all of this. Oh, so you actually happened to be recording your screen when you were trying to... Yeah, when I was trying to log in and then I found the messages. Wow. Alongside her father's messages, the film also includes digital remnants of Janilda's own life. Bits of her online self, which perhaps one day she'll leave behind too. What you're seeing right now is all my old photographs.

19:31Some of them that are still floating around the internet. Kind of questioning as well. How reckless I have been on the web, I guess. As this really lonely teenager on Tumblr, sharing things, making comments about things, like all these banalities, where are they going? Where are they staying? What image am I leaving after my death? It almost feels like a curse of immortality. Like, we think that after we die, like, death is the only certainty and that's where everything ends. We'll stop the rat race. We're not in this world anymore. I'm finally in my final resting place. But then you think about all your digital remains that continue to work and to become repackaged and resold on the internet.

20:25So it's very strange. I think strange is the word. Yeah. I think we almost don't have the language to talk about it. Yeah. Janilde's work is on display here as part of an exhibition called Data Never Dies. Lots of artists from around the world have been wrestling with exactly these issues of what happens when our data, our devices, or the online worlds we spend so much time in outlive us. Rosa Weber is the curator. So when it comes to questions that have to do with our digital culture or how we deal with technology, I think science is super important because it gets us to the facts. But facts don't tell the whole story.

21:04So I think artists are really good at making sense of the lived experiences, of what it means to live in a world that's increasingly influenced by technologies. And I also think that art is not always about answering questions, but about raising new ones. One of the other pieces in the gallery explores grieving our deceased tech. Underneath a delicate white shroud is the unmistakable outline of a laptop. with a very big number embroidered on it like an epitaph. So what's that 41 ,525 ,982 ,945 bytes? They're all gone. And they won't ever come back. So I think we should take a moment now to stand still with that and to remember the data that have gone last.

21:52For me, all these different artworks are in a way new rituals. When somebody passes away, we have all these ceremonies to deal with the physical presence of somebody, whether it's a funeral or cremation. And we don't really have these rituals in the digital sphere. So I hope the exhibition is also an invitation for people to think more about designing their own rituals, but also to not only leave it to big tech to create or to solve those. So you had the launch for this exhibition just a few days ago on Friday. was it something that resonated with people that came to see it? Yeah, very much so.

22:31I really started to notice how people shared their own experiences with digital archives. So I had a person sharing with me how his mother recently passed away and he still goes to WhatsApp to listen back to the voice messages that he has had with her. So it can be a very good way to mourn, to listen back to these memories. but it's also very eerie because okay maybe this is a very personal interaction that means a lot to you but you don't necessarily want whatsapp or the companies behind it to read and listen along and i think that's something in the exhibition i want to create some more awareness of like who all has access to these different traces of data that we leave behind so maybe we could have a look around and you could walk us through some of the exhibits here so it's obviously rosa walks me over to a big table with a huge flat screen set into it.

23:22And across the screen flows lots of tiny pixels. Tell me about this. We're standing in front of an interactive installation by Greek artist Kiriakigoni. And what the artist did is collect the Google search queries that she herself did over a period of five years. Her very personal, intimate questions that she asked Google. And what you can do is you can click on the screen. So maybe try it out. Let's try this one. So I'm just going to click on a white bit and it now tells me my little pony searched on the 7th of February 2012, quite late at night. And it was an option to delete yes or no. I'm going to click yes.

24:06If you elect to delete the search term, it vanishes from the screen. No one else will have the option to see it. But the search history prints out physically, on a tiny slip of paper. OK, so it's just printed something out. So there's like a little receipt-style printer here. The digital data has been transformed into analogue data, from a floating pixel on a screen that anyone can access, to a tiny piece of paper that I, and only I, can hold in my hand. So it's deleted from the digital display now. Nobody else who comes here can see that this person searched that. Exactly. So in this moment, what you actually did is delete a search term in the digital sphere and making it physical.

24:46And I think in this transition, something important happens because you also ask, can I take it home now? Can I tear it off? It's up to you to decide what you can do. You can set it on fire. You can keep it in a book, keep it very close. You can do a ritual with it. That's up to your imagination. You have this piece of data and no one else. And it also comes with the responsibility. and I think that responsibility is not always taken enough by these big tech companies. They are not very transparent about what they do with your data and it's also really hard for us to get a sense of that. I'm now the custodian of this small piece of data.

25:22It feels insignificant but also somehow precious. I would like to invite you actually to put it in your pocket. Yeah, I'm not going to throw it away, don't worry. And see also maybe at the end of the day if you find it or maybe if you're washing your pants and you come across it, how you feel about it. So I think it's also like a longer ritual that can go on after the exhibition. I think having something tangible makes it feel more human. And also people would probably feel a lot more comfortable if they knew that they were kind of entrusting all the stuff that's on the internet about all of us to, I guess, curators, curators like you, who are going to at least try and tell those stories with some humanity rather than just leaving them there forever and not really thinking about it.

26:07But back to Devin's question. Just how many of these accounts are there clogging up server space in data centres around the world? Well, if anyone can help us find out, this guy can. In the next three decades alone, about 2.2 billion people will die, many of whom will leave behind almost like a lifetime of data. These dead profiles are amassing at an increasingly rapid pace. This is Carl Oman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University in Sweden. I'm a sociologist by my undergraduate training and most of my work, at least my early work, was on what happens to your data when you die and why is that important for you but also for your descendants in the society that you leave behind.

26:58Carl is one of the only people we could find who has actually tried to quantify the online accounts of dead people. So my first study on this was on Facebook. And we took these enormous data sets, one from Facebook that showed the age and nationality of all 2.7 billion users. And then we took a matching data set from the United Nations that showed mortality projections per age group and nationality. And when we put these together, we could build a statistical model that showed how many Facebook users are expected to die every year throughout the 21st century. Karl and his colleagues then used that data to project this trend into the future.

27:41And what we found was that if Facebook's user growth would stagnate, they would likely host more dead-than-alive profiles by the mid-2060s. If they continue growing, however, until they saturate all markets, they will host close to 5 billion such profiles by the end of the century. So according to this research, it may only be a few decades before dead people on Facebook begin to outnumber the living, or it might be much sooner than that. This is kind of a mind-blowing idea, and it has all sorts of consequences for the internet and for us as a society. But before we get into that, Devin didn't just want to know about Facebook.