AFTER we die, our bodies are reduced to dust or ash, through burial or cremation. The fate of the digital corpuses we leave behind is rather more complicated. Before the advent of internet-hosted storage and services, your digital remains would have been accessible only to those with physical access to your computers, and only then if you had not applied encryption or password protection. But these days many people leave traces of their lives spread across the internet. Facebook knows who we love and hate, Google knows what we are interested in, Amazon knows what we buy, and so on. Specialist services may even store information about your genetic makeup (23andme) or archives of your files (Dropbox, CrashPlan, and many others). Who owns your data when you're dead?
