The passwords we leave behind by Jiro Lambert

Death used to leave behind boxes of photographs, letters, diaries and perhaps a cupboard full of things nobody quite knew what to do with. Now it leaves behind something far more complicated: a digital version of ourselves scattered across servers, clouds, social networks, gaming platforms and forgotten passwords.

The strange thing is that the digital self does not understand death. Your body stops. Your Facebook profile may not. Your iCloud library certainly does not suddenly vanish because a heart has stopped beating. Your gaming avatar can remain running around a virtual universe long after the person controlling it has gone. The internet, unlike a cemetery, has remarkably little understanding of finality.

That makes digital inheritance one of the great neglected problems of modern life. We prepare wills for houses, savings, jewellery and cars. We discuss who gets the family photographs. Yet increasingly those photographs are not in an album. They are in a cloud account protected by two-factor authentication on a phone that may be locked in a drawer.

And that is where the trouble begins. Social-media accounts generally do not simply disappear when somebody dies. Depending on the platform, an account may be memorialised, deleted or left sitting there indefinitely. Some services allow designated legacy contacts or relatives to request changes; others impose considerable restrictions. The dead person may become a digital ghost: still tagged in photographs, still appearing in memories, still occupying a little corner of the internet while everyone who knew them has moved on.

There is something simultaneously comforting and disturbing about that. A memorialised profile can become a kind of digital gravestone. Friends can leave messages. Family members can return to photographs. Birthdays can become moments of remembrance rather than occasions for an algorithm to awkwardly suggest sending greetings to someone who is no longer alive.

But preservation should be a choice, not an accident. The same applies to photographs. iCloud, Google Photos and other cloud services are effectively enormous digital attics. They may contain thirty years of family life, including pictures nobody else remembers exist. Losing access to them can mean losing an irreplaceable historical record.

The obvious solution is depressingly unglamorous: plan. Download important photographs. Keep sensible backups. Decide which accounts should be deleted and which should survive. Nominate appropriate legacy or trusted contacts where services allow it. Keep an inventory of important accounts. Make sure somebody you trust knows where the instructions are kept.

And, crucially, do not confuse giving somebody your password with giving them unlimited permission to become you. The same question becomes even stranger with gaming. Millions of people now possess digital identities that may be more elaborate than anything they own physically. Avatars have costumes, achievements, virtual houses, inventories, friendships and histories. Some contain items acquired over years and sometimes significant sums of money. Yet a gaming avatar is generally not treated like a painting hanging in a house. It exists because a company permits it to exist. That should make us uncomfortable. We have created digital lives without establishing universally understood rules for digital death.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that a digital legacy is not merely about property. It is about memory, privacy and dignity. Your family may desperately want your photographs but have no business reading every private message you ever sent. Your friends may treasure your gaming avatar while you would have hated the idea of somebody continuing to use it.

So the digital will should contain more than passwords. It should contain wishes. What should remain? What should disappear? Who should receive the photographs? Who should manage the accounts? Which parts of your digital life are private even after death?

We have spent decades teaching technology how to remember everything. Perhaps it is time to teach ourselves how to forget deliberately. Because when we die, our digital selves may remain. The sensible thing is to decide what kind of ghost we want to leave behind.