What researchers actually know about your digital afterlife

In 2019 two researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, Carl Öhman and David Watson, did something nobody had bothered to do. They counted the future dead. Not across the whole internet, just on one platform. They took Facebook's own user figures, added United Nations mortality data, and ran the arithmetic out to the end of the century. The result made headlines, and the numbers have held up.

If Facebook had signed up not a single new user after 2018, at least 1.4 billion of the people already on it will have died by 2100. If it kept growing at the pace it was, that figure passes 4.9 billion. Either way the site fills with the dead. Under the no-growth version, the profiles of the dead overtake the profiles of the living within about fifty years. A social network turning, one abandoned account at a time, into the largest cemetery ever built.

One detail matters more than the headline number. Most of those profiles will belong to people outside the West, across Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the platforms grew fastest and latest. So whatever becomes of all this data is not a Western problem. It is already a global one, and mostly it is being decided by a handful of companies that never set out to be in the memory business.

If the Oxford work is about scale, a 2026 study from Carnegie Mellon is about need. A team led by Jenny Tang, with colleagues including the security researcher Lorrie Cranor, interviewed 21 Americans aged 60 and over about what they would want handed on and how they had arranged it. The headline finding runs straight against the usual assumption that digital legacy is mostly a matter of sentiment.

What people wanted their families to reach first was money. Bank logins, investment portals, the accounts that keep the bills paid. Those came up as the thing that mattered, well ahead of photos or profiles. It makes sense. When someone dies, the people left behind are thinking about rent and a funeral, not a back catalogue of status updates.

Two further findings sting. Almost none of the people interviewed had heard of the legacy tools the big platforms already offer, the inactive-account managers and legacy contacts and the rest. And despite every password manager on the market, most were relying on a handwritten notebook. The tools exist; hardly anyone knows they do, and of those who plan at all, many plan on paper. There is nothing wrong with a notebook. It only helps, though, if someone can find it.

There is a deeper problem underneath all of this, and a 2021 study named it well. Jack Holt, James Nicholson and Jan David Smeddinck ran workshops with password-manager users and mapped out a real contradiction. Everything we are told to do to stay safe while we are alive, long unique passwords, two-factor logins, encryption, never write it down, never share it, is precisely what locks a family out after a death.

They call it a post-mortem privacy paradox. People say digital legacy matters, agree they ought to sort it out, and then don't. Some of that is the ordinary reluctance to dwell on dying. But some of it is structural. The better your security habits, the worse your family's odds of ever getting in, and setting up a proper handover can feel like quietly unpicking the safety you spent years building. So most people leave it, and the encryption meant to protect them becomes the wall their relatives run into.

This is the part worth sitting with. The gap is not carelessness. It is that the two goals, keep everyone out while I am alive and let the right people in when I am not, pull in opposite directions, and almost no everyday tool is built to hold both at once. That is the actual design problem. It is also the one a legacy plan has to solve rather than wish away.

Öhman and Watson did not stop at counting. They argued that leaving the fate of billions of dead people's data to whatever happens to be commercially convenient is a mistake. These profiles are a historical record, a rough first draft of how ordinary people lived, spoke and grieved in the early internet age. Öhman has since described this material as our digital remains, and made the case that it deserves something like the care we give to physical remains and public archives.

The risk they flag is concrete, not abstract. When a company owns the servers, a single business decision, a shutdown, a price change, a pivot to something new, can erase a slab of the human record or lock it behind a paywall, and nobody outside the boardroom gets a vote. Because the growth came mostly from outside the West, the people with the least say over these decisions are the ones whose histories make up most of the archive.

You cannot fix that as one person. But it does reframe the small, personal version of the same problem. Every account you leave undocumented is a tiny instance of the same handover-by-default: control passing not to someone you chose, but to whoever happens to hold the servers and write the terms of service.

Line the three findings up and the instruction is hard to miss. The scale is enormous and still climbing, that is Oxford. What families most need is financial access, and hardly anyone has switched on the tools or told a soul where the notebook lives, that is Carnegie Mellon. And strong security, left unplanned, quietly disinherits the very people you would want to help, that is the privacy paradox. None of it is solved by better passwords. It is solved by leaving a map.

A map is a modest thing. An index of what exists, which banks, which investments, which accounts actually matter, with clear pointers to how the right person reaches each one, kept somewhere safe rather than in your head or a drawer only you open. It does not mean handing out passwords today. It means deciding, once, who should get in later, and making sure the way in outlives you. Switch on the platforms' own legacy features where they exist, and write down that you have done it, because a nominee who does not know they are named cannot act.

This is the gap LifeWyn is built to close. A zero-knowledge vault stays sealed while you are alive and releases what you choose to the people you named once it is verified they should have it. It answers the paradox the researchers describe by keeping strong security and a planned handover in the same place, instead of forcing you to trade one off against the other. What happens to an estate, and how it is administered, differs from country to country, so check what applies where you live. The research is unanimous on the one part that does not vary: the plan has to be made while you still can.