Inspired by the following opinion article published on the Pirate Parties International website the other day, there should be an European citizens’ initiative to get a digital legacies legislation drafted and passed.
https://pp-international.net/2026/02/digitallegacies/
The proposed legislation, which can be named the Digital Legacies Act, would mandate some Big Tech platforms, especially social media services and email services, to have features which would let users to choose whether their accounts would be archived/memorialized, deleted or if possible, transferred to designated recipients upon their death. The platforms can include Apple, AOL, Bluesky, Discord, Facebook, Github, Google (including YouTube), Mastodon.social, Microsoft, Instagram, LinkedIn, Proton, Pinterest, Reddit, Roblox, Steam, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, Wordpress, X, and Yahoo.
The above thanatosensitivistic options can be triggered if one of the following two are met, whichever come the earliest.
1. Authenticated will from the user themselves.
2. Five years of account inactivity.
For the second criteria, it must be configured by the user themselves, while the user should be given fair warnings that the process is irreversible. The platforms would likely need to have special support channels for measures to address unforeseen factors like hospitalization, prison and so on, on a case-by-case basis. Those measures can include freezing or extending the thanatosensitivistic countdown timer.
As the opinion article puts it, to directly tackle corporate arguments that it’s costly to maintain access and preserve user data, a shift in governance regulations is required. Email services and social media platforms must be treated as effective utilities, similar to healthcare and other emergency services. This means that the financial costs required for the services to maintain access to user data would become a government expense, an essential service akin to a military defense budget.
There is one big utilitarian reason to support the creation and passing of the Digital Legacies Act. A 2020 Fast Company article warned that in the age of deepfakes, lies and misinformation are just as likely as to arise from the absence of data than the presence of it.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90549441/how-to-prevent-deepfakes
The following hypothetical exercise, which is described in the FastCompany article, is useful to understand the so-called “historical context attacks” which would become all too possible as long as Big Tech platforms are allowed to carelessly “wreck history” in pursuit of profits.
Let’s say it’s 2045. Online, you encounter a video supposedly from the year 2001 of then-President George W. Bush meeting with Osama bin Laden. Along with it, you see screenshots of news websites at the time the video purportedly debuted. There are dozens of news articles written perfectly in the voices of their authors discussing it (by an improved GPT-3-style algorithm). Heck, there’s even a vintage CBS Evening News segment with Dan Rather in which he discusses the video. (It wasn’t even a secret back then!)
Trained historians fact-checking the video can point out that not one of those articles appears in the archives of the news sites mentioned, that CBS officials deny the segment ever existed, and that it’s unlikely Bush would have agreed to meet with bin Laden at that time. Of course, the person presenting the evidence claims those records were deleted to cover up the event. And let’s say that enough pages are missing in online archives that it appears plausible that some of the articles may have existed.