The weird rise of cyber funerals

Your online data is a bit like single-use plastic: there’s tonnes of the stuff and it’s very hard to get rid of. When you die, your physical body will slowly decay, or be sent to a crematorium or dissolved in a tank filled with potassium hydroxide. But that pesky digital corpse? That’s going to be around for a while, like a data soul stuck in online purgatory, never to receive salvation. Unless, of course, you set it free.

All you need to do is organise a cyber funeral. Thanks to recent changes to privacy legislation in Europe and South Korea aimed at protecting the living, we now have more power than ever over our personal information – even from beyond the grave. While this may have felt like a gimmick in the past, cyber funerals – where our personal data is removed from the web posthumously – are slowly becoming a viable option.

But why might you want to book yourself in for an appointment with an online undertaker? While friends, family – or even a legal team – might tidy up someone’s offline affairs, a digital legacy is still left to chance. An online funeral can help expunge articles or blogposts that mention spent convictions or ensure social media accounts and other online ephemera are locked down and left in good order. Simply put, when you die in the real world, it’s only right and proper that you also die on Facebook. And Instagram. And Google.