- South Africans worry that online accounts of deceased people can be used for illicit activities.
- Thankfully most major online platforms have a way for family to shutter these accounts when requested.
- It may be a good idea to include log in information for your accounts in your Will.
How many profiles and accounts do you have for online services and platforms? According to NordPass the average is 100 and that makes sense.
These days every website and its dog requires an account and while it may prove tricky to keep a handle on all of these accounts, it could prove impossible for your friends and family to track everything down should you shuffle off of your mortal coil.
However, as generative artificial intelligence has grown in popularity, concerns regarding its abuse to mimic users has grown. In a recent study conducted by Kaspersky, two third of South African respondents said the identities of the deceased are vulnerable to identity theft.
Digital immortality sounds like a cool idea but in reality it can be problematic, especially if criminals get a hold of a person’s account.
“More than half of the respondents in South Africa (58%) agree that the online presence of people who have passed away could be recreated using AI. The attitude to it varies, with 37% of respondents believing it is acceptable to create a digital identity of someone no longer alive through photos, videos, or other mementos, while 42% disagree,” Kaspersky reports.
Those 58 percent who worry about AI mimicking a dead person aren’t living in sci-fi land. Meta recently rolled out a solution that allows influencers to train an AI to respond as if it were the influencer. As more people come online and post more of their lives, video and more, the threat of identity theft becomes more real, especially once a person isn’t around anymore to flag it.
Thankfully this is a problem with a solution. Facebook allows loved ones to memorialise an account when a valid request is submitted. Rather than deleting the account it is preserved and secured to prevent unauthorised access. Instagram offers a similar feature as does X.
In fact you’d be hard-pressed to find a popular platform that doesn’t offer this functionality, you can event submit a request to close a person’s Gmail account when they pass on.
However, we’d recommend going a step further and leaving details of the accounts you know about in your Will or a similar document. This information can help your family or friends shut down accounts that don’t have ways to do that for another person to do that for you. There is no shortage of insurers and financial institutions who can assist in drafting and maintaining a Will.
It may also be a good idea to conduct an audit of websites you have profiles on as you get older, just to keep a handle on how much of your personal data exists online in some capacity or another.
