How To Avoid Digital Immortality

Now is the time to organise your online life

- Paul Robert

“DO YOU HAVE HER PASSWORD FOR FACEBOOK?”

My sister, Louise, looked across the table from behind our mother’s iPad, while I leafed through a tiny notebook full of scribbled telephone numbers, addresses, and an occasional user ID and password. “Nope,” I said. “Nothing here.”

Only the day before, our nonagenarian mother, Miep, had passed away peacefully. Louise and I, still numb, found ourselves in her apartment in Purmerend, near Amsterdam, going through the next steps—cards, funeral arrangements— and trying to erase what made up her digital footprint.

She didn’t have a huge online presence; insecure about the digital world, Mum had really only played Wordfeud with us, read the news, checked local shops for their weekly offers, and sent e-mails to her friends and family. She had a Facebook account only to keep up on family news. Her few online activities were recorded in the tiny notebook that my late father had started 20 years ago. But Mum didn’t really grasp the difference between a URL, a user ID, and a password, and the booklet was as enlightening as a collection of hieroglyphs.

We ended up logging into Facebook from my laptop, using Mum’s user ID, and clicking “forgotten password?” This allowed us to then reset the password through her e-mail account, log in to Facebook, and go through the several steps (“are you sure?” “are you really sure?” “are you really, really sure?”) to permanently delete her account.