Dr. Kasket is sounding an alarm for everyone who has never thought about life and death in the
- What is “sharenting” and how it may be responsible for over 7 million cases of identity fraud by 2030
- How anyone who has their DNA tested and entered on a genealogy website is making powerful decisions about their privacy and that of others
- Medical privacy, and how our medical data can be used for and against us
- What happens to our data self when we die, and who has (or should have) the right to make decisions about it
I had a chance to interview her to learn more.
Q: I've never heard the term "sharenting" - can you discuss that a little bit?
A: "Proud parents everywhere have always loved chattering to other folks about their darling offspring and showing off about their children's accomplishments and cuteness. Since the beginning of social media, though, parents have been able to engage in those activities with a lot wider reach. The term for sharing information about one's kids online is 'sharenting', and as the 'silver surfers' are becoming more tuned in to the Internet we're also getting a lot of 'grandsharenting'. Parents and grandparents do this without their children's meaningful consent, partly because kids aren't really capable of understanding the consequences of online sharing. Even the adults in the picture - parents and grandparents - may not really grasp the full future implications and may underestimate the costs. In 2017, 92% of two-year-olds in the United States already had digital footprints, in many cases dating back to before their births, because sonograms are shared online in over a quarter of all pregnancies. in the UK, Barclays Bank has forecast that by 2030, 'sharenting' could lead to widespread identity fraud, costing about £670 million a year - that's over $816 million.
"Even if your kid's personal details remain secure and unexploited, however, there are other concerns that I have about sharenting. I did it for years myself - as an expat who moved from the US to the UK 20 years ago, I used social media as a way of sharing details of my family's life with faraway family and friends. My 10-year-old daughter told me last year how much she'd always hated it and how out of control she felt when she realised I'd posted things that she hadn't realised I'd shared, or when people she'd never met before recognised her, knew things about her, and called her 'famous'. One thing that really bothered me about it is that she'd never expressed this very strongly to me, but when I asked her what she'd like to happen next, she said she wanted all past posts about her taken down. Believe me, it wasn't easy to do, in practical terms - Facebook and Instagram didn't make it easy, and I realised just how much I'd shared without her permission or without giving it much thought. I don't post any personal information about my daughter now."
Q: Why do we need to be concerned with a digital afterlife?
A: "Our lives are digitally saturated, and your digital life will eventually form your digital afterlife, at least for a period of time. If you think that your family members or other next of kin will automatically get access to digital accounts or devices if something were to happen to you, just because they are your family, you might very well be wrong. Families everywhere in the digital age are struggling emotionally and practically because they cannot access practical or sentimental information that they need or want - it's locked in password-protected devices or accounts, and people are surprised when they're denied access by the corporations that manage and control that information. It seems peculiar that Facebook would have more say-so over a person's data when they die than their family would, but that's what happens when we sign up to a platform or an app - we essentially engage them to manage our information as they see fit when we're no longer here. There's even the possibility that our digital information could be exploited after we are gone in various ways. For example, if digital accounts are not closed down or frozen after someone's death because the family doesn't know about them or doesn't know how to go about notifying the relevant companies, those accounts can be hacked, profile-cloned, or used to impersonate the deceased person for financial gain. If you consider that criminals were able to do a lot in the past with deceased people's social security numbers, just think what more they could get up to with the wealth of personal, sensitive information we leave behind online.
"In terms of the sentimental side, the memorabilia and the record of our life on earth, here's no way of predicting what kinds of things are going to be meaningful to our loved ones after we're gone. Everyone's grief is different. Digital legacies are incredibly important to some bereaved people, while others don't care about them. Even though we can't predict what people will need or want, most of us want to spare our loved ones pain and suffering - that's why people do estate planning and make wills. We can make things easier for our loved ones by nominating Legacy Contacts on Facebook and Inactive Account Managers on Google accounts; periodically curating sentimentally important memorabilia into a physical format like a book, and/or backing it up onto a device that can be accessed without your loved ones needing to deal with a third party. Before I deleted all of my daughter's photos and funny sayings off of social media, for example, I archived them by ordering a set of printed books from my Facebook archive. Those will likely stand the test of time better than anything I commit to binary code today. The saying that 'online is forever' isn't true - those photo books are far more likely to be accessible to future generations."
Q: How can we be more aware of our digital traces and how that affects our privacy?
A: "First of all, remember that social media are only the tip of the iceberg. We all think about things like social media when we think about our digital traces, but those are just our digital autobiography, the stuff that we upload and share on purpose, the stuff we know is viewable to other people. But what about all the other stuff, the stuff we think about less? We have digital archives made up of our email and message histories, our stored documents and photos, stuff we don't necessarily expect to be widely accessed or shared. We're in the age of surveillance capitalism, of course, so cookies, fingerprinting, tracking, algorithms trace our every move. We fill our houses with smart devices, RIng doorbells, Amazon Echo Dots. And have you ever thought about how much it would say about you if someone saw your full internet search history, or every website you'd ever visited?
"You've also got to remember that almost everything we do online is connected to other people. Social media, email, WhatsApp, FaceTime - you're always connecting to someone else, communicating with someone else. When someone dies, it's currently impossible to just subtract that person's data from the Internet - it's interwoven with the information of hundreds of other living persons, all of whom should have an ongoing right to privacy. Online, we don't just make decisions about our privacy - we make decisions about other people's. When you post about your kid or your friend or your colleague, you make a decision about not just your privacy, but theirs. When you spit in a tube and send it off to Ancestry or 23andMe, and fill in your family tree online, you make a decision about not just your privacy, but other people's as well. That's the thing about the online environment - living and dead, everyone is connected. That's one major reason that I've now decided to practice much more of what I suppose you'd call digital minimalism - especially when it comes to the personal information of other people. I never expected that to be an outcome out of researching and writing a book about digital afterlives! But the book ended up being more much about privacy, and less about death. As a writer, you don't always know where a book is going to go!"
ELAINE KASKET Psy.D. is a psychologist, keynote speaker, author and longtime scholar of death and the digital age. American-born, and UK-based, she is an HCPC-Registered Counselling Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is also a visiting lecturer at multiple universities including an Honorary Professor in Cyberpsychology at the University of Wolverhampton. A veteran media source, Dr. Kasket is uniquely qualified to address modern challenges to our privacy across the life span, from cradle to grave, including life, death, privacy rights and the power of big tech. She lives in London, where she maintains a busy psychotherapy practice.
Her newest book, All the Ghosts in the Machine, is available on Amazon and through other fine booksellers. For more information, visit elainekasket.com or visit Dr. Kasket on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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