□ Our reporter Chen Jie
The recently released "2021 China Wills Database White Paper", after analyzing more than 220,000 wills that have been put into storage, found that virtual properties such as Alipay, WeChat, QQ, and game accounts have become common properties in the wills of the post-90s and post-00s generation. Types of.
Changes in people's ideas are inseparably related to the background of the times, social environment, and technological progress.
As of the beginning of this year, there were 4.62 billion social media users worldwide, equivalent to 58.4% of the world's total population.
In the digital age, data is inseparable from us.
But what to do with these "permanent" data after a person dies?
Can it be inherited?
On the eve of Qingming Festival, the topic of digital heritage arouses our new thinking.
See you in the clouds,
A kind of warm "time and space accompany"
Cai Xiao, a 32-year-old grass-roots civil servant in Yangzhou, opened a drawer and took out a USB flash drive that looked like a key.
Before plugging in the computer, he put it back again, quickly closed the drawer, and let out a sigh of relief.
"My sister is in a special situation. She is gone all of a sudden, and her family can't accept it emotionally. I rushed to Chongqing and brought back some of her relics. I also copied some photos of her that were stored in Baidu Cloud. You don't dare to look at those things at all." My cousin died in a car accident 3 years ago, and although Cai Xiao still didn't have the courage to open the USB flash drive, this sealed "electronic heritage" is extremely precious to their family. The memory, the reluctance and the pain are all packed in this U disk.
How do we miss those who have passed away?
Different times have different ways.
Due to the needs of epidemic prevention and control, during the Qingming Festival this year, online flower offerings, online messages, and screen-based sacrificial sweeps will become mainstream.
And "Cloud Sacrificial Sweep" is not only a replica of offline sacrificial sweeping methods to online, but with the deep integration of the Internet and human life, the social accounts of the deceased have begun to comfort those who have lost their loved ones on a spiritual level. family.
Yu Limin, who opened a photography studio in Nanjing, was taken aback by an accidental "going online" of a deceased friend.
That was the first "zero growth" day for Nanjing in the new round of epidemic.
The sunshine in the spring is just right, and the people who have queued up at the nucleic acid testing point to go home are also much more relaxed.
"There are not many people doing nucleic acid at the moment, hurry up!" Yu Limin just sent a WeChat message in the community owner group when he saw a new like in the circle of friends.
When he opened it, he didn't expect it to be Lao Lin who passed away in 2018!
"He is a photography enthusiast. He retired from the Landscape Bureau for only one year before he passed away with a cerebral hemorrhage..."
After a short circuit in his mind, he reacted and tentatively sent a WeChat message: "You, is that his wife?"
After a long time, "Lao Lin" replied: "Yes, he left and left the WeChat account for me. I'll come up and walk around if I have nothing to do..."
Several common old friends also talked about this incident at the same time.
Everyone sighs with emotion that when people reach middle age, they begin to experience some birth, old age, sickness and death, and friends who "leave" have been "live" on WeChat.
"As long as I don't delete it, it seems like there is still a connection." For Lao Lin's wife, after logging on to her husband's WeChat account and seeing his friends' constantly updated Moments, there is a "feeling of holding on to something." .
Not only relatives and friends, but also the Internet attributes of digital heritage make it transmit energy among strangers.
Born in 1982, Zhejiang girl Xiong Dun, after suffering from lymphoma, created the humorous comic "Get Out, Tumor Jun!" based on her own experience.
, inspiring many people.
Her last Weibo was stopped at 11:41 noon on November 15, 2012.
However, when opening the comment area of Xiong Dun's Weibo, which has reached 125,000, as of press time, the latest one was issued on March 31 this year, and people leave comments here almost every day.
"Unconsciously you have been gone for ten years." "It's been really bad recently, but I know that everything will be fine, right?" "The first message was anxiety about college entrance examination, then anxiety about postgraduate entrance examination, and now it's anxiety about graduation "A lot of patients have left recently, say hello to them!"...Although it has been ten years, Xiong Dunxiao's "Xiangyang" mentality towards life, bravery and the fight against the disease is still being passed. "Digital heritage" continues to nourish those who are experiencing the same predicament.
"When you see the words left by the 'commemorative account', as well as the touching picture of using this account as a 'tree hole' and constantly 'building a building' below - I think this is undoubtedly a part of the deceased to the living. A warm 'time and space accompaniment'." said Yuan Fang, a post-90s media person.
digital heritage,
more than a number
"If I accidentally leave this world one day, what legacy will I leave behind? The balance in the bank card, the mortgage, a bunch of unfinished movies, or the circle of friends that will never be updated and only visible for three days?" Accounts that have been operating on the Internet for many years will not be properly handled due to their accidental departure. The well-known UP master of station B and the main creator of "Current Channel" entered the China Wills Library.
More and more young people are writing digital assets into their wills.
The China Wills and Testaments Library recently released the "2021 China Wills and Testaments White Paper", which released the will data of post-00s for the first time: among the testamentary population from 2020 to 2021, the post-00s increased by 14.42% compared with the previous year.
The testamentary property is dominated by bank deposits, and the disposal of virtual property accounts for 17.3%.
Chen Kai, director of the China Wills and Wills Bank Management Committee, introduced that as of December 31, 2021, the China Wills and Wills Bank had received a total of 445 wills involving "virtual property", "different from other age groups, Alipay, WeChat, QQ, Virtual properties such as game accounts and Taobao online stores are the most common types of property in the wills of the post-90s and post-00s generation.” With the gradual increase in the proportion of mobile mobile payments, the transfer and inheritance of virtual properties through wills have become the most popular among young and middle-aged groups. one of the concerns.
But in the actual operation, people find that transferring and inheriting virtual inheritance is far more complicated than imagined.
What is digital heritage?
For the product of this information society, the "Digital Heritage Charter" published by UNESCO defines: "The digital cultural heritage on the Internet, that is, the written works, materials, pictures and audio and video in the form of the Internet, forms a kind of cultural heritage. legacy."
After sorting out the digital heritage, Sika, the relic organizer, found that this is a huge information system, including currency (money in WeChat, Alipay and other accounts), virtual currency (game currency, Q currency, Bitcoin, etc.), privacy ( There are at least five categories, such as electronic albums, e-mails), autobiography (accounts on major social platforms), and digital traces (information left by the deceased’s ID on the Internet).
Six years ago, someone asked the question, "I have more than 70,000 yuan in Alipay and more than 20,000 yuan in WeChat. If I die unexpectedly one day, what will be done with the money?" This topic caused heated discussions.
But in fact, the money in Alipay and WeChat wallet belongs to the user's personal property, and is only temporarily stored in a third-party account, just like in a bank. If relatives want to withdraw, they can provide a death certificate and relevant information, and just apply. Too much doubt, but how to deal with social network accounts is still relatively vague.
The first case of digital heritage that could be retrieved occurred in 2004.
The parents of an American man who tragically died while on duty in Iraq, Eisworth, want to be able to get the e-mail account password of the deceased child to check the mail, so as to make a more complete family memorabilia.
However, Yahoo rejected the request, citing "protection of user privacy" - even though the "user" has passed away.
After going to court, the final verdict is: no password is provided, but the content of the mail will be burned on a CD and sent to the parents of the parties.
In China, related cases have also emerged in recent years.
In 2011, Ms. Wang from Liaoning lost her husband in a car accident. She hoped that Tencent could provide her husband's QQ password so that she could obtain letters and photos related to the two.
But Tencent's response is that to get the password, you can only do it by "recovering the stolen number".
In this regard, Xu Difeng, a professor and doctoral tutor of Nanjing University Law School and a lawyer at Grandall Lawyers (Nanjing), said that accounts on social networking sites cannot be understood as accounts on property such as bank accounts. Accounts, he is just a service provided by the platform. When you create an account, you will sign an agreement. After a person dies, how to deal with these accounts and whether they can be inherited depends on how you agreed at the beginning."
The reporter browsed some top social networking sites. In the software user agreement that people often ignore and choose to directly agree to when they register, there is a key agreement - the ownership of the account belongs to the platform company, and the user can only use it himself, and cannot be sold, transferred, or inherited. Wait.
"Digital heritage is still a new thing. Although the Civil Code, which came into effect in January last year, has included virtual property in the scope of legal protection, it has not yet specified specific provisions. At present, the relevant legal system for studying digital property rights is not yet sound." Xu Difeng The professor also emphasized that, unlike physical space, in a vast virtual space, if very strict rules are not established, the risk will be very great.
If an account and a mailbox are inherited after death, there may be some problems in common sense.
For example, after inheriting a person's work mailbox, the other party is still sending business transaction emails to this mailbox, which may cause disputes.
"Digital property includes not only property rights, but also personal rights. If it can be transferred or inherited, it may violate the privacy rights before life and privacy interests after death. Therefore, behind digital heritage, there are technologies that must be taken seriously. and ethical issues."
inheritance,
How to face the "digital me"
According to the latest Global Digital Report, as of January this year, there were 4.62 billion social media users worldwide, which is equivalent to 58.4% of the world's total population.
In the past 12 months, global social media users have grown by more than 10%, adding 424 million new users, which equates to an average of more than 1 million new users per day.
The average global internet user now spends nearly 7 hours a day online, and social media accounts for an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes of our total online time per day, accounting for 35% of our total online time.
Our lives are inseparable from the Internet, and digital heritage is obviously an unavoidable reality.
The movie viewing insights written on Douban, the articles collected on WeChat, and the comments written on NetEase Cloud Music are not only the traces of individual life, but also the intellectual cohesion of a generation. Live" portraits of the era.
Many platforms have already taken action.
In order to prevent the account from not being disposed of for a long time, Sina Weibo has specially set up a "deceased account" - in this state, the account cannot log in, cannot post new content, cannot delete content, and cannot change its status.
And Bilibili also set up "commemorative accounts" for Bilibili users who unfortunately passed away after obtaining the confirmation and consent of their immediate family members. joy or sorrow.” In June last year, Apple unveiled its “Digital Legacy Plan” at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
This service will allow users to designate a digital heritage contact during their lifetime. Once confirmed to have passed away, the contact can apply for access to the deceased's photos, information, memos, contacts, documents and other digital heritage.
In November last year, Tencent also updated its own privacy policy to safeguard the rights of the close relatives of the deceased.
For the inheritance of digital heritage, some netizens believe that there is no need to pay too much attention.
Some people joked that don't worry too much, the website may not outlive you.
Judging from the decline of MSN and Xici Hutong in the early years, chat sites and social media have been updated very quickly.
In the past, a seven-digit QQ account cost tens of thousands of yuan, but now you can own it for a few hundred yuan; and those mobile games that cost tens of thousands of krypton gold at every turn will not be played for a long time.
Some netizens firmly disapprove of the inheritance of digital heritage, saying that if their social account is inherited, it will be a large-scale "social death scene".
Sina Weibo once conducted a questionnaire survey of 10,000 people on the issue of "digital heritage". As for the question of "will your family members see the content of your social account after your death", 16.8% of the netizens surveyed said "yes". ”, 83.2% expressed “unwilling”.
In this regard, Cai Xiao believes that cyberspace should preserve those things that are meaningful to human society and useful to future generations.
You don't have to save data that's just for entertainment or nonsense social information.
He said that when he leaves this world, he will choose to cancel all his social network accounts before his death. "In the Japanese drama "Life Deletion Agency", after the client's death, there is a professional successor to delete the computer and mobile phone for him. electronic data.”
"Speaking of digital heritage, I thought of a beautiful sentence I read in an article before, which talks about the memory of the human brain: the brain is the most precious and secret corner of our body - people have only a thin At the moment, the rest are all long memories, and the things we hold dear in our life are in that soft and fluffy pink brown. Therefore, whether it is to obtain or input information to the brain, it is necessary to be very careful, in any case, Everyone should have the ability and right to withdraw from information sharing at any time and retain private neural data." Yuan Fang believes that this passage is very enlightening for our view of digital heritage.
Everything we leave on social platforms is undoubtedly precious, but whether "I" is willing to share information, to what extent, and to what extent, may be a more important issue.
The Internet writer Jiang Nan once put forward the saying of "three deaths" in his novel: a person will die three times, the first time is when he expires, biologically; the second time is when he is buried, people come to participate His funeral, remembering him all his life, then in society he dies and has no place for him anymore; the third time is when the last person who remembers him forgets him, and that's when he really dies.
In the digital age, everyone may have two selves: physical and digital.
Data is huge, fragile and perpetual.
When our "physical body" leaves, what kind of "digital me" and "electronic version of me" should we seal up?
Perhaps, what we should pay more attention to is how to live our current self well, strengthen our body, shape our personality, and be a positive, enterprising, optimistic, friendly and loving person who contributes to the society. I hope that one day, when people Open up that digital you and discover what an interesting soul it is.
(At the request of the interviewer, the relatives of the deceased in the article are pseudonyms)