Who Acts When the User Is Gone? Digital Remains, Survivor Claims, and Post-Mortem Governance

Abstract

Digital systems continue to govern accounts, devices, data, and recovery channels after an account holder dies, leaving survivors to manage digital remains through mechanisms built around a living user. We examine post-mortem digital governance as a sociotechnical problem of cooperative and contested work, focusing on who acts when the user is gone, what claims they make, and what barriers shape recovery, preservation, closure, and protection. We conducted a content analysis of $800$ Reddit posts about post-mortem digital privacy and security, coding posts across assets, actors, actions, privacy tensions, access barriers, policy gaps, emotional contexts, and risks. Findings show that phones/devices often act as gateways to other digital remains, socially connected actors make most claims, and data loss emerges as a central harm. We synthesize these findings into a Post-Mortem Digital Governance Framework for designing mechanisms that support survivor coordination while limiting access by purpose, asset, actor, and context.