Keywords

1 Introduction

Digital assets are produced in large scale by technology users, especially after the advent of the Internet. Those assets consist not only of texts and photos stored in personal computers; they are also worldwide spread in application servers, such as e-mail managers and social networks. Most users do not think it is important to manage their data considering the event of death, and many feel uncomfortable to use applications of the kind [7]. That uneasiness might be due to death-related taboos and beliefs societies harbor [19], directly influencing the way people face computational modelling of aspects related to death, mortality and mourning.

Recently, Google launched Google Inactive Accounts [13], enabling the management of user account data so that photos, emails and documents have a destination when their accounts are no longer used. This implies, among other things, making a digital testament to provide a fate for the legacy after the user`s death. Options in this system are: setting a time limit for the account to become inactive; defining a cell phone number and alternative email address for alerts when the inactive time period runs out; notification of contacts; data sharing; and account exclusion. Considering memories are narrative texts based on data (such as mementos or mental images), not data themselves, Google Inactive Accounts provides the user with different procedures to narrate his posthumous identity. This means actively defining some cornerstones to treat digital legacy, instead of abandoning data to their own fate.

Such a solution has its advantages and limitations. Among the advantages is the fact that it (a) doesn’t allow the digital legacy to be lost. These days, a large part of what we do is on the internet, stored on normally distant servers and password protected; (b) permits deletion of inactive accounts which in the near future could pollute and/overload the internet; and (c) provides the user with the option of keeping, or not, every digital thing that was built up during his lifetime.

From that discussion, many human values emerge and need to be taken into account when dealing with “inheritance”, such as privacy, trust, ethics and interpersonal conflicts. On the other hand, legal questions need to be discussed and often the available technology is ahead of the lawmakers. Thus, in this article we ask: to what extent can the technical and cultural issues found by software engineers and interaction designers, faced with Google Inactive Accounts, contribute to the discussion of legal aspects related to the digital legacy? As the objective of this study, we intend to raise legal questions that emerged from applications that permit the configuration of a posthumous digital legacy, from the viewpoint of engineers.

For this study, our multidisciplinary research group, composed of specialists in Computer Sciences, Linguistics and Law, made a literature review about wills, inheritance [9, 12], legislation on digital legacy and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aspects related to this issue [4, 15, 19]. Among the researches our review analyzed, some papers were related to volition on digital legacy [19] and posthumous interaction [18].

The experiment was part of an exploratory research by means of questionnaires, which were answered by web software engineers. This research was intended to elicit advantages and disadvantages of the options provided by Google Inactive Accounts. The data collected were categorized and analyzed, leading us to important discussions on legal and technical implications of that tool, under software developers’ view, who are users of that application too. From the qualitative data analysis, we come up with legal and technical recommendations. These recommendations are useful for human-computer interaction designers and software engineers who, along with the market, can propose or improve computational solutions that are compatible with users concerns. On the other hand, since this is a multidisciplinary study and because we understand that technology directly affects and modifies other areas of knowledge, we believe that the contributions given here may also be useful in the field of law, where regulations need to be created and/or adapted to deal with the digital legacy.

2 Literature Review

In this section, we will discuss, based on Brazilian legislation, the Right to be Forgotten, aspects related to inheritance rights, the Internet Civil Mark, digital wills and some studies that have been carried out on posthumous digital legacy.

Inheritance rights, in relation to civil law, vary greatly from one country to another especially when it comes to cases where this is no will (which is very frequent in terms of digital assets). This becomes even more complex if taking into account, in the case of digital legacies, the global spread of users, software companies and servers. Seeing the many different facets that this discussion presents in this sphere, we opted, in this study, to focus on the Brazilian judicial system since the researchers and the questionnaire respondents are all Brazilian.

Currently, the Brazilian Civil Code [7], in article 1788, is the statutory basis for inheritance rights: “Art. 1.788. A person dying with no will transmits the inheritance to the legitimate heirs; the same applies to the assets that were not contemplated in the will; and the legitimate inheritance subsists if the will lapses or is judged to be null.”

In other words, after death, in the hypothesis that no will was made or, even if one has been made and no express mention has been made of rights, this right is passed on to the legitimate heirs. It is clear, therefore, that if a person makes a will before dying which expressly determines his/her wishes with respect to a particular right, this must be obeyed unless the will is judged to be null or has expired.

However, there is a bill of law, No. 4099/2012 [3], which has already been approved by the Constitution and Justice Commission, which has been awaiting Federal Senate approval since October 2013. This bill proposed the inclusion of the following paragraph into article 1788 of the Civil Code [1]: “Single paragraph – It is to be transmitted to the heirs all the content of digital accounts and files belonging to the author of the inheritance.” It is worth mentioning here the justification given for the Bill of Law [3]: “…there have been cases taken to the courts of situations where the families of deceased persons wish to obtain access to the files or accounts stored by internet services and the solutions have been very contradictory, leading to different, and sometimes unfair, handling of cases in similar situations (…) The best thing is to ensure that inheritance law covers these situations, regulating and unifying their treatment, making it clear that the heirs will receive in the inheritance access and total control of these digital accounts and files (…)”.

Despite the social aspect being considered in this justification for the Bill of Law, there are some deeper issues that need to be considered. Firstly, it is necessary to consider the hermeneutic effects that approval of this paragraph in article 1788 of the Civil Code may imply. Indeed, the caput of the article mentioned proposes that the rights may only be transmitted to the legitimate heirs if they have not already been made the objects of the will or, further, if the will is judged null or expired. Thus, it is correct to state that if the will maker includes a clause in the will on the non-transmission of rights, such as passwords to access internet accounts, his wishes must be respected unless exceptions apply (annulment or lapsing of the will).

However, with the addition of the single paragraph, another exception is created which is independent from any previous analysis: the content of the digital accounts and files must be transmitted to the heirs regardless of the data owner’s wishes. This premise ignores the deceased’s privacy, as well as any possible disinterest when alive to have accounts accessed posthumously.

Currently, in order to gain access to such content, heirs must bring declaratory action suits in the knowledge that there is no consensus of understanding on this issue. The most common result, when access is authorized, is the removal of the deceased’s profiles and content (photos, videos, texts) which have not been shared with family.

Precisely due to the fact there is no specific legislation on this issue, its regulamentation is casuistic. So, for example, in the case of Facebook, as stated in the Terms of Use, in case of user death the family is required to send the death certificate in order for the account to be deleted. In this case, the decision to delete is in the hands of the family who “inherit” the possibility to destroy data whilst not holding legal ownership of it. It is also worth noting that this solution is conditional to the existence of documents which prove death; in Brazil, this is the Death Certificate.

Secondly, we must not leave out of our consideration the Right to be Forgotten. This is not a new topic within international legal doctrines. In the countries of the European Union, the Right to be Forgotten resulted in the application of rules which govern personal data protection, in particular the principles of consent and purpose,Footnote 1 expressly stated in the European Council Directive 95/46/CE of October 24th 1995 [8]. Based on these principles, the European data protection agencies have used the Right to be Forgotten as the basis for removing data available on the internet when they no longer serve the purposes for which they were collected and stored. This position has already been adopted by the data protection agencies of France (Comission Nationale de L’informatique et des Libertés), Italy (Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali) and Spain (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos — AEPD), in response to requests from people to intervene for the deletion of personal data on the internet.

This movement has been gaining greater attention due to the ease with which information can be kept and circulated on the internet and how it can be used to create over-exposure of rumors, facts and news even when the events that originated this information may have taken place long ago. This issue became even more relevant with the publication of Announcement 531 of the VI Civil Rights Movement promoted by the Federal Justice Council [7]. The text, a doctrinal guidance document based on the Civil Code, places the Right to be Forgotten within the realm of personal rights: “The tutelage of human dignity in an information society includes the Right to be Forgotten”. In this way, announcement 531 draws on an interpretation of the Civil Code in relation to personal rights by stating that people have the right to be forgotten by the public and press.

Thirdly, the passing of Law no. 12.965, known as the Internet Civil Mark [2], has added another even more unconstitutional aspect to Bill of Law no. 4099/2012, since it establishes, as a basic principle, the right of privacy (Article 3º, II) and protection of personal data, in the form of a law (Article 3º, II). Among user rights and guarantees, in Chap. 2, Article 7º, II, is the assurance for the user of “non-violation of the intimacy of private life, its protection and compensation for material or moral damages resulting from such violation” and in Ch. XI, “permanent deletion of personal data that has been supplied to a particular internet application, on request, at the termination of the relationship between the parties…”.

On the other hand, studies into HCI show that users’ desire in relation to “forgetting” their data, in the form of posthumous erasure, is in line with the Bills of Law on posthumous data in Brazil. Studies by [14, 18], despite using different methodologies and distinct profiles of research subjects, point towards similar results: most users wish to have their data deleted after death, but practically none of them had already given thought to this before being approached for the survey.

Respecting users’ wishes in terms of the fate of their data has also been discussed from the point of view of volition [20] and posthumous interaction [18]. The authors propose that the software models the fate options for the dead user’s data and enable this choice to be made upon accepting the terms of use. Today, most systems ignore cases of death or set a policy that has little flexibility for the fate of digital legacies in the terms of use (which cannot be changed by the user), and which is not necessarily adequate for the legal system in the country where the user lives. On the other hand, those which include in the terms of use some kind of rule in relation to user death do so in a way which is not clear.

Google’s initiative is in line with the proposal to respect volition in terms of the digital legacy even though it doesn’t directly mention the word “death” in its interface. The term “inactive account” suggests the company, with the aim of achieving greater support, opted not to use a taboo term to designate the application and its functions. Even so, what the application offers is the possibility to make a digital will, which is a testamentary instrument that cannot be disassociated from death. To make such a statement, we used a definition of will which transcends local judicial systems: “It constitutes a mandate to the executor” [12].

However, ensuring these “last wishes and intentions” (which in this study are elements of volition) are carried out by technical means within legality, meeting the cultural demands of each society, is a challenge in the universe of digital assets for a number of reasons as raised by Edwards and Harbinja [9]:

  • The difficulty of defining what digital assets are, given the multiplicity of elements that can be placed in this category: e-mails, ebooks, music and downloaded movies, posts in social media, score and fictional money in games, reputation in virtual communities, photos posted (or shared) by third parties;

  • The disparity between the terms of use of each service provider and local legislation;

  • The difference of judicial systems between the jurisdictions where the deceased user lived, where the heir lives, where the software company is based and where the providers that store the information are located;

  • The conflicts of interest between stakeholders (the deceased user, heirs and the software companies);

  • Respecting the deceased user’s privacy in the case of no will being made or a will which clearly states which data should or shouldn’t be inherited by others;

  • The difficulty of separating what is a digital asset (an e-mail for example) and what is the information that the digital asset holds, it being controversial how to decide if some information is something that can be left in a will for others.

Such dilemmas on the preservation or destruction of a deceased user’s data, which generate heated discussions in terms of ethics and law, have been worked on in an almost homogeneous way from a technical viewpoint: “forgetting-by-selection” and “remembering-by default”, instead of the other way around [22]. This shows that, from the company’s viewpoint, the standard option is to store data since the technical procedures to do this are becoming less and less complex thanks to technological evolution. The possible financial gains via big data analytics and curatorship services for deceased users’ data are still being estimated.

A proposal made by Brubaker et al. [4] to deal with these challenges consists of shifting the focus from inheritance to stewardship. Such a paradigm shift would imply treating deceased users’ data not as a legacy or property to be transmitted to others but as a set of social symbols which would be administered and curated by a steward. On one hand, this approach takes into account the dilemma that in a digital universe it is difficult to separate which data constitute the user’s identity and which constitute his assets; on the other, this does not discard the need for legislation that regulates the steward’s actions in a way which is analogous to that of the executor of a will.

Faced with so many conflicts between technical, legal and cultural aspects related to digital wills, we carried out the present study as detailed in the next section.

3 Methodology

In this research, an exploratory study was performed using questionnaires for a target population of web software engineers with knowledge of HCI so as to answer the following research question: to what extent can the technical and cultural issues found by software engineers, dealing with Google Inactive Accounts, contribute to the discussion of legal aspects related to the digital legacy?

The questionnaire contained the interface of Google Inactive Accounts [13] and instructions for the respondents to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of this functionality based on the options available in this tool. This tool gives optional measures to be taken by the user, regarding the management of his account: (a) setting a timeout period, after which the account can be treated as inactive; (b) being alerted via text message and optionally email before the timeout period ends; (c) adding trusted contacts who should be made aware that the user is no longer using his account; (d) selecting data to be shared with the aforementioned trusted contacts; and (d) allowing Google to delete the account.

The participants of the survey were 25 students on a specialization course in Web Systems Engineering invited as volunteers during a classroom activity. All participants are graduates in the area of Computers. The group consisted of 23 men and 2 women. The average age was 33 years. All were resident in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. For the purposes of standardization and anonymity, each survey subject is identified by the letter “E” followed by a number.

From the interpretive analysis of the responses to the survey, we found thematic patterns that we categorized as follows: (a) inheritance rights; (b) the Right to be Forgotten; (c) temporal contact information; and (d) technical stalemates. From this, we intend to articulate cultural, technological and legal aspects of the fate of the digital legacy.

4 Data Analysis

To begin the discussion, we must mention that the lack of a legal framework for the digital legacy was mentioned more than once by the survey subjects. E5 states that it is an advantage that Google Inactive Accounts allows “at least this option since there are no policies on personal data that circulate on the internet after a person’s death”. On the other hand, a problem was pointed out on the lack of legal norms governing data of this nature: that different systems can develop distinct policies for deceased users’ data. According to E11, “Does the service have a link with other accounts of other profiles that the user might have? Probably not, as this is a Google resource. Therefore, I believe that other companies should make this resource available or pass this function on to a competent organ”.

In the same tone, E15 questions the lack of backing in real-world civil documents for decisions on the fate of virtual legacy, stating a disadvantage of Google Inactive Accounts as “not having the option to link with legal documents (death certificate)”.

Inheritance Rights. The Brazilian Civil Code deals with inheritance rights in article 1784 [1]. In few words it deals with the transmission of assets of a deceased person on to the heirs. The deceased’s assets consist of possessions, rights and obligations held during life and transmitted to heirs. The Civil Code, when dealing with inheritance and its transmission, does not mention only the tangible assets and, therefore, the intangible assets may also be considered as also being covered by the law. E1 states, “from the moment that the user agrees to use the service he will be “delegating” the use of his data to another person in his trust, thus, should unforeseen events occur such as death or other problems, even bad health, this information can be recovered and preserved by another user”. The ideas of delegation, recovery and preservation mentioned above ratify that digital data is a kind of property that is owned and transmitted by inheritance where the heir is responsible for its management.

The terms “inheritance”, “heir” and “legacy” are found in the specialized literature on this topic [4, 9, 12] and were used frequently by the engineers in the survey. For E9, for example, a limitation of data exclusion is “the fact that a virtual legacy that the person built up will cease to exist”. Understanding his digital data as being a possession to be passed on to his offspring in the same way as material assets in a will, E20 states that “with the aim of giving him the digital inheritance as a gift, he gave his telephone number and email address”.

The affective value of these assets and the attachment that they evoke, complicating factors when discussing the value of these data and the impacts of their transmission to others or their destruction, were mentioned by E1: “I have dear ones that I’ve lost, I keep their photos, videos and other belongings. I can’t imagine ever destroying these memories. I’m human, I miss them”. E20, showing not just emotional worth but also economic value of digital assets, adds: “by offering this option, the user can decide who the digital heirs of the content will be, which sometimes can be of great economic and affective importance”.

Another problem introduced into the discussion is the fact that the heir is not consulted before any data is destroyed. According to E9, one disadvantage to the Google Inactive Accounts system is “not having an “heir” who can administer or even authorize the actual destruction of your data”. In the real world, there are a number of cases in which the future heir must be consulted before disposing of a person’s assets.

E19 sees an advantage in the fact that the “user leaves his/her profile as “inheritance” so that the other person can decide what to do with the profile”. In this comment, it is clear that it’s the heir who will be deciding what will be done with the deceased’s data. However, there was no mention in the responses of another problem which is linked to digital assets: what if the heir does not wish to take what the deceased user has left him? As an example of this, we can take a user’s intimate conversations on social networks, log registers of sites associated with illicit practices or even pornographic videos and photos. Is the heir (or even the executor) obliged to deal with these data? And how can the heir’s right to receive digital assets or not be made compatible with the user’s right to express volition [20] with regards to the fate of his legacy? According to E11, “giving the user greater autonomy over his/her information” is the advantage brought by this application.

Concern is shown by E1 with the limits of control that the heir must have over the data, running the risk of altering them in such a way as to taint the deceased user’s reputation: “as the new user will preserve an individual’s information who has died or suffers from serious health problems, he must be aware of the issue of privacy since, for example, sometimes these new user will, over time, be able to change what was agreed with the old user who entrusted him completely”. Similar cases occur when login names and passwords for email accounts and social networks are inherited allowing the user to impersonate the deceased and act in bad faith.

The Right to be Forgotten. The Right to be Forgotten has generated discussions on the field of technologies [7]. For example, for E3, “the main advantage is having personal information excluded from the web”. E9 sees as an advantage the possibility of “eliminating information and data that is no longer managed by the person”. E20 is in line with these opinions and relates them to data privacy: “I may possess documents that I would never like other people to have access to, even after my death, and in this case it would be clear and well defined that after becoming inactive I would want their total destruction”.

As well as this, E2 puts forward another aspect of privacy related to the Right to be Forgotten, which would “make your information unavailable on the web preventing insurance scams etc.”. Here, we can see a concern with the user’s right to protect himself, in life, against unauthorized use of his data as mentioned by Farrugia [11].

Furthermore, in the previous category cases were mentioned where the heir might not wish to receive any kind of data from the deceased user, whereas we now discuss cases where the user does not wish some particular data to be shared with the heirs as mentioned by E12: “What if the information there makes someone sad or upset when they discover something that the person hasn’t told them?” In this case, one should respect that “there are data that I would like my family and friends to inherit and other data that I wouldn’t”. However, when this survey was made, Google Inactive Accounts did not allow the user the possibility to make this kind of choice; it is up to him to delete everything or leave everything to one or more heirs. For E18, “There is a lack of options in the tool that would make it possible to take different actions for different services”. E24 exemplifies this situation, stating that “There should be the option for the user to choose which information must be excluded and which must be kept. The user may, for example, want his profile on Google + to be excluded but his blog and Youtube videos preserved”. The possibility of the user choosing the content he wishes to pass on to the heirs is discussed by Maciel and Pereira [19].

E9 shows concern for the symbolic value of information by commenting that “There is information within Google apps that should not be lost since it adds symbolic value to the groups and relationships established between users”. E9 further suggests that the service “could be more wide-ranging and allow types of data that add symbolic value to be mapped by the user onto his circle of relationships, offering the option to keep or delete each one of the connections”. Such a solution is very interesting but complex from the computer modelling point of view since it requires dealing with an intangible legacy, dealt with by Khalid and Dix [15] from the viewpoint of an Extended Episodic Experience, which would include not only digital assets but also the user’s social and affective relationships within digital environments.

On the other hand, the possibility of controlling these data by the definition of a period of non-use of the account, as proposed by Maciel [20], is also modelled by the Google service which was seen as a benefit by the engineers. For E5, one advantage of the service is “being able to set the period of time for the account expiration due to inactivity”.

Another problem in this respect, according to E8, is that “The user does not usually know when he is going to die so he may expose information which at that moment he would not wish to share.” The unpredictability of death would impede, in this case, the user to previously delete from his legacy that which he would not like to be passed on to another by means of Google’s tool.

From another perspective, E12 relates the preservation of the digital legacy to digital mourning [21] by questioning “to what extent would it be interesting to keep the information of someone who is no longer with us; to keep remembering this person could do good or bad (…), I have come across people who have died but their profiles on Facebook and Orkut are still alive. Or even receive an email from a friend who had died. So it would prevent this kind of situation.” However, this is a complex area since digital mourning could involve suffering or may provide a way of getting over a loved one’s death by forming a community of mourners or by producing digital memories [16].

Temporality of Contact Information. A central issue in the discussion of passing on digital assets is related to the moment and the way the heir’s information and the sharing procedures are registered on the system. Many participants showed concern with the modification of information that is used to control the transmission of the legacy. E2, when analyzing the service which requests a telephone number to contact the user with the aim of confirming activity on the system, states that “telephone numbers change constantly, it’s possible to configure the service and be excluded from the network without receiving an alert on your cell phone”.

E20 goes further by stating that the nominated heir could also change email address and be unable to be contacted by the tool: “… he didn’t think his son would change email address and telephone number and this would mean everything would be lost in the digital ocean”. If changing the user’s own contact data is already a problem, this becomes even more serious when there is no control over the designated heir changing his data.

Still on the topic of temporality, E16 raises the issue of the case of the heir dying before the user: “How can it be ensured that the person nominated has not died too, in this case how could the person be contacted?” According to the Brazilian legal system, in cases such as this, the will should propose a substitute for the heir, something which very rarely happens. If there is no substitute, the inheritance is then transmitted to the necessary heirs.

Many other engineers also question the possibility of undue data exclusion when, for example, the user does not access the account for some time due to health reasons or incarceration. For E6, “Should the user be unable to access the internet, Google would exclude the account and there would be no way to reverse the process (in the case of imprisonment)”. E16 shows concern in this way: “How to ensure that the user who, for reasons of serious illness but still alive, has been unable to access his profile for a long time would not have it cancelled”.

For E14, one limitation is that “There may be a need to access the account and the account has already been deactivated”. Access of this nature can be requested by judicial means in case of family members who feel they have the right to receive the deceased user’s data. E15 exemplifies why the possibility of “excluding files such as videos for example is problematic. Often this video may be useful to people and, because of the exclusion, people will not have this content at their disposal anymore”. E2 exemplifies cases such as this: “Google deletes your information and it becomes impossible to track it, making it unavailable for a lawsuit for example”. On the other hand, in case the family wishes to close the deceased’s account, E24 understands that this application brings advantages to the extent that “in case of death it avoids turmoil for the family who try to cancel the Google account. With this resource, the process would be more bureaucratic”.

Technical Stalemates. Software engineers, given their academic and professional backgrounds, are concerned with the benefits to the company, in this case Google. E2 comments that: “Google provides more space on its servers and the active users gain more innovation resources”. For E9, one advantage for the company is “being able to measure the real number of active users”.

Despite this being a Google service, E24 raises an issue: “It’s for Google products only. Other services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email accounts with other providers will remain active”. E25 adds: “As well as Google, I have contacts in many other places and data stored in these other places. To be really effective, the data would have to be integrated. It’s not enough for just Google to provide palliative solutions. This raises the question: How to integrate everything? There is a long way to go until there is a solution of a kind that really meets the demands”. This difficulty of integration was mentioned in category “a” of our study (inheritance rights), since the lack of legislation on this topic means each software company has to define its own policy for data treatment of deceased users. However, this is an issue that also involves technical aspects, such as those of category “e” of our study (technical stalemates), given the difficulty of designing solutions that integrate data of very different natures in different systems, belonging to different companies.

In this sense, it’s worth highlighting that some companies have invested in this market niche. LegacyLocker.com, for example, offers software that functions as a repository of account data, which are forwarded, after death, to the nominated heirs. E6, though, shows a concern with the fact that the Google Inactive Accounts service is “optional” for users: “If the user does not define the settings, the account will not be deactivated”. With the existence of more interactive terms of use, this could be mitigated, increasing user engagement when defining the fate of his digital legacy. This design solution was also proposed by E18 for system modelling: “The system should force users to set the options of inactive accounts, both new and old ones”. In this sense, solutions that lead to more interactive terms of use [17] and solutions that allow the user to configure his prior volition in terms of the posthumous digital legacy are required [19].

The possibility of the system to induce a user to losing data, due to modelling problems, is also raised by the engineers. E8 alerts to the fact that the user “could have his account excluded should he make an error in the time limit setting and does not opt to be advised by cell phone; his contacts may not see the message”. In this sense, solutions that provide usability and communicability to the system are fundamental. Given the complexity of the treatment of this topic, according to E11, “some of the options, such as notify contacts, advise me and share, require of the user a certain level of maturity in decision taking; and what if the user shares by mistake?”. E20 reminds us that if the system “is badly configured, it could result in undesired actions. This is why all the decisions to be taken must be well detailed and easy to understand”.

In this sense, E11 states “I do not consider “EXCLUSION” to be an option. Will the person who opts for exclusion have all the content permanently deleted? I prefer to consider the option Deactivation of content, making it unavailable and inaccessible on the internet, however, in the case of safeguards of requests by a relative or competent organ, this content could be reactivated or accessed”.

E16 sees an advantage in “allowing the nominated family members to transform the profile into an internet memorial”, since Google accounts are connected to the profiles. Brubaker et al. [5] and Lopes et al. [16] have discussed such possibilities. Some social networks are beginning to implement services that offer memorials for deceased users. Facebook, for example, has already presented an option to transform a normal profile into a digital memorial after filling out a form called “Facebook Memorialization Request” [10] to prove the death of the user.

Finally, regardless of the categories raised in this study, the fact that we are studying this topic is a theoretical exercise on a very controversial issue, especially when stimulating the study subjects into making this reflection. For E20, the existence of the Google Inactive Accounts service, regardless of its limitations, also brings benefits since “by having this option, the user has to analyze how to act on the digital documents belonging to him and how these should be treated when he becomes inactive. This is an issue that people do not stop to think about and safeguard themselves (…)”.

5 Conclusion

In this paper, we sought to raise the legal issues that emerge from the availability of configuring a posthumous digital legacy in applications such as Google Inactive Accounts from the viewpoint of software engineers. From the interpretive analysis of the survey responses, there was discussion of inheritance rights, the Right to be Forgotten, temporality of contact information and technical stalemates of the tool.

From the legal point of view, as happens in many areas and not just with inheritance, the legislation has not kept up with the changes in society and, especially, with technological developments. Until recently, the concern with transmission of assets was limited to those of a material nature. Only now have legislators begun to take the first steps towards regulating the transmission of non-material assets. This is a very controversial issue, as seen in the analysis of the survey results.

There are now more doubts than certainties. The validity and future regulamentation of the Internet Civil Mark [3], which establishes the right to privacy as a basic principle, will bring more solutions to the problems of transmitting non-material rights in the case of death. However, as has been occurring, the answers to the problems will be given casuistically, analyzing the characteristics of each case so as to reach the most appropriate solution within the legal framework.

It can be seen, throughout analyses of the responses, that there are a number of concerns with how to deal with this topic. However, no mention was found of how to define the responsibilities of the heir of a digital asset.

It is worth highlighting that, as a limitation of this study, despite having considered bibliographies of international authors, has focused on Brazil since it is necessary to carry this out in accordance with the legal norms of each country.

The dilemmas imposed by the issues discussed in this study are fundamental for systems development to consider cultural and legal aspects of death and legacy. The HCI area can greatly collaborate by questioning solutions, testing them and proposing ways of dealing with death, mortality and the management of digital legacy.