The Sum of Our Data

- Hey everyone, it's Anne. Every click on your computer, every swipe on your smartphone leaves a data trail information about who you are, what you do, who you love. So much data about you, expanding constantly in the digital clouds. So I guess the question is, do you care? Would owning your data or having more digital privacy make your life better? And what happens to all that data when you die? Today, under "The Best of our Knowledge," The sum of Our Data.

- From WPR.

- This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home in auto policies, try it at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary not available in all states.

- It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps. Somewhere, scattered across databases in hundreds of thousands of servers, there are vast reams of information about you. What you buy, share, like, who you know, where you go, what you think, what podcasts you listen to, maybe even your DNA. It all adds up to the story of you, in data. So this all started in the late sixties and seventies with the invention of the modern database. But this experiment of data mining of unknown actors collecting information and making predictions about us, well that you could argue had its start at a preschool.

- I grew up in Berkeley. My father was a English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

- Journalist Susannah Breslin.

- The university ran a preschool called the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center, which was a laboratory preschool where researchers and students at the university could study children.

- What is going on today?

- And when I became a student there in 1972, when I was four, I became one of a cohort of 128 kids who were in a study, where they were trying to figure out if you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be? The Child Study Center was designed by a Bay Area architect named Joseph Esherick and it was made for spying on kids. So it had these mirror twin classrooms that sat next to each other. And in between them there was this observation gallery where the researchers could essentially hide and spy on us so they could see us, but we couldn't see them and they could hear us, 'cause there was a kind of transparency that hung between us.

- What is going on here?

- And then for one-on-one testing, they would take us over to this adjacent building. And in those rooms, there were one-way mirrors through which they could watch us. And there were also eavesdropping devices so they could listen to what we were saying, listen to what we were saying. What we were saying, what we were saying, what we were saying.

- In her memoir, "Data Baby: My life in a Psychological Experiment," Susannah Breslin's search for her data becomes a search for her own story. Here's producer Angelo Bautista.

- So it sounds like Michel Foucault would've loved this preschool.

- Totally normal upbringing.

- Yeah. A panopticon preschool.

- Exactly.

- Tell me about your parents. What kind of parent turns their kid into a kind of guinea pig for these scientists?

- Well, my parents were first and foremost intellectuals. Like I said, my dad was a English professor at Cal and my mother was an English professor at a smaller college in the East Bay. And so they really were interested in the life of the mind. I think they saw themselves as sophisticated, educated people who were in one way or another, gifted or special. So the idea that there was this special preschool for special kids who would be in this special study was fascinating to them. And I think it to some degree served as a kind of status symbol. If you got your kid enrolled at the Child Study Center, you know, you were the child equivalent of having like a BMW or something, a little elevated marker of who your kid might grow up to be.

- Yeah, I was wondering if the researchers ever considered whether or not you knowing that you'd be part of the study would affect the study at all? Kind of like an observer effect.

- Exactly. Yeah. I think in the mind of the researcher, they wanna create a space where there's a minimum observer effect as possible because that's how they get, the best data that they can get.

- Hmm.

- But the reality I think, is that it was, as the observer effect dictates, it was impossible, certainly in my situation, for me not to be affected by the fact that I was being studied. My parents were distant, especially my mother was a very sort of cool person who was not particularly interested in being a mother at a certain point. And so the study took on a kind of larger than life aspect in my psyche. I've in a way described it as the mother that I wanted that was always interested in me or always sort of there for me, even when I wasn't actually specifically being studied, it was a kind of shadow in my mind of giving me this sense that my life was meaningful, I had a purpose, I was part of something that was bigger than myself.

- Hmm. So in a way, the block study, the study that you were in became sort of this, not necessarily parental figure, but someone that cared about you.

- Yeah, so it was really unique to be studied. We were studied initially at the Child Study Center when we were in preschool. But after that we all went to different schools and grew up and moved to different places. But we would return for these assessments to Tolman Hall, which was where the psychology department was on the university campus. And we would be assessed in these testing rooms that had one way mirrors and it would be you and a researcher in this room. And in a way it was like a child's dream, which is, here's an adult who's giving you its undivided attention and the entire focus is you. They wanted to know all about us, what our personality was like, what we liked, what we didn't like, what was our relationship like with our parents, with our siblings. Had our parents gotten divorced or were they still married? Who did we wanna be? Who did we think we might imagine being our romantic partner when we grew up? And that felt like love.

- Hmm.

- So I really liked being studied.

- So I kinda wanna fast forward a little bit past your childhood. So you grew up to become a journalist and specifically a journalist covering sex and the sex entertainment industry. And when I was reading that in the book, I thought, "I can't imagine you or the researchers studying you "would have ever concluded that path for you." Why did you become a sex journalist?

- I don't know if I have a simple answer to that question. So I think in part, the study did shape my becoming a journalist in general. You could describe a researcher studying me in a way as being journalistic. They're closely studying their subject, they're creating a personality profile and they're telling a story of a life or a person. As I wrote the book, I did wonder why I became a sex journalist and was like, "Is there any way this has anything to do "with being in this study?" And the one common thread that I saw was that both things are heavily voyeuristic. There's this sort of peeking through these one way mirrors and being spied on and poking into and peering into the most intimate aspects of somebody's life. And the porn industry is what I've written the most about. And that is nothing but voyeurism. Maybe the study turned me into voyeur, but or maybe I was always gonna be one. It's hard to know the difference.

- It is hard to know. And you kind of went on a quest to figure out what the study had done. So what compelled you to write about the study years later? What was going on in your life?

- In late 2011, I got married to a man I had met on a dating app and had known for nine days, we eloped in Vegas. And four days after that I found out I had breast cancer during the course of annual mammogram. So those were two things that happened that changed my life radically. And I had a type of breast cancer that was more rare and aggressive and I noticed that that made me of a lot of interest to the oncologist. One of the oncologists came in and said, "Hey, I have all these interns with me, can we come in?" And they sort of gathered around me and were talking about me and my case and I was just like, "God, this is like being studied again. "This is like being a lab rat again." And I think that brought back the study in my mind. I moved with my then husband to Florida and my writing career was floundering and I was just like, this was not how I thought my life would end up. I thought my life would be interesting. Is this what I was supposed to be? You know, it was this sort of existential crisis. And I thought, "Well, I wonder who the blocks thought "I was going to grow up to be." And I thought there must be a file, the study must have kept all this data on me. I wonder what it would tell me about me. And so that sort of piloted me as a journalist to go on this quest that would take me all the way back to Berkeley where everything had started in an attempt to figure out, who they thought I would grow up to be.

- And did you think they would just, you know, you would show up to Berkeley, they would just hand you your file and everything would make sense?

- You know, I think of myself as kind of cynical, but I think I'm actually also sort of strangely optimistic. And I think I really thought, there will be this file, I'll just open it and it'll just tell me everything about who I am and everything will kind of make sense. That's not quite what happened. That was part of a pattern in my life where I was always looking outside of myself for something or someone else to tell me who I was. Wanting my parents to see me as this bright child, wanting the study to see me as exceptional, wanting my then husband to see me as a good wife. Being a journalist and wanting people to think, oh I was so, you know, badass because I would go hang around the porn industry or whatever. And so it was just like one more way I was trying to find my story outside of myself. And this book really sort of forced me to tell my story for myself.

- So as you were digging, what were you able to find? What did you uncover about the study, about yourself?

- I didn't get the answer that I thought I wanted, but all kinds of other things happened. I left my marriage, I moved back to Berkeley for a period of time to really immerse myself into that place that I had come from. And I think I have found that I have, this is, I'm sorry, this is the question I cannot answer. I feel like this is like the, like I struggle to answer the, I feel like this is like the money shot answer that I'm supposed to like. I have a lot of trouble with memoirs and I feel like people only value memoirs that deliver happy endings.

- Hmm.

- And the promise of a memoir is that in the end, the main character discovers who she really is and accepts herself for who she really is. And loves herself and maybe goes like marries herself a burning man or whatever. And I feel like reality is more complicated and I feel when I do these interviews that I'm supposed to say, "At the end of my journey I discovered who I really was "and now I'm like enlightened and unburdened." And it feels more complicated than that. I think that's one of the things that I take away from it is that the study was, in many ways very beneficial to my life and saved me in some ways. And I know that I'm not the only one who is in that study that feels that way about the study.

- Hmm.

- So I'm very appreciative for it. And it's sort of funny how the study ended when we were 32, but here I am 20 plus years after that and in a way am still involved in the study. Like I can't let go of it.

- Thank you for your honesty and your candor in that answer. You said you were in contact with other participants in the study. What was their experience?

- Well, everyone who was in the study had their own unique experience. One guy I talked to, he dropped out of the study in his early adolescence. I think it felt too intrusive for him.

- Hmm.

- Another guy who was in the study felt like it had really just changed the course of his life that they had in fact intervened in some ways in his life that had really helped him move in a new direction.

- You mentioned that the guy that dropped out felt that it was too intrusive. You talk a lot about privacy in this. This was a study done long before this era of data collecting and data mining that we have today. Did that ever come up for you? Thinking about your private life, whether or not this was really invasive or crossed a line in any way?

- I thought a lot about privacy while working on the book. And I definitely felt like from the get go, privacy is something I think is just this antiquated notion. I have a kind of eye rolling response to it. It no longer exists. When people talk about protecting their privacy, I'm a little bit like, "Are you aware that like everyone "just has their hands on your data at this point?" I don't believe that any part of my life is private.

- Hmm.

- To return to where we started, your brain is now the panopticon or we're all living in this mass high tech panopticon. We are aware that we are being surveyed, but we don't quite seem to wanna think about the consequences of that. I think that my experience being in this study was sort of a canary in the coal mine version of what's happening now, where kids lives are being quantified and shared from even before they're born when their mother posts an ultrasound online and what effect that will have on them as adults because we don't know yet. It is like another great experiment. I was heavily impacted by being surveyed in this way. Children are not stupid. They know that they're being observed, that their lives are being shared at a certain point. And I'm very interested to see what those kids are gonna say about their lives and what memoirs they'll write when they become adults and start sharing what it was like to have the whole world watch them grow up online.

- Maybe this is not a useful thought experiment, but I was wondering if you did have access to every data point in your life, what would you do with it?

- If I had access to every data point in my life up to this point.

- Yeah, basically. Would you want that? Would you do with something with that?

- That's such a great question. I mean, one thing I learned during the process of researching this was, there's data and then there's the story that you draw from it. I thought originally I was looking for my data, but I was really looking for my story. So I think if I was presented with the mass of data connected to my life, I would just feel like I am not the sum total of a set of data points. What story can I draw from this data, which is already skewing things? 'Cause now it's becoming a subjective process it would be attractive but also frightening because what if the sum total of the data of my life tells me that I am someone other than who I think I am or who I want to be. It's a bit of a Pandora's box, right?

- Hmm. It is.

- I don't know if I would wanna open it.

- Journalist Susannah Breslin. Her book is called, "Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment." And that was producer Angelo Bautista talking with her. So as hyper connected as we are today, is privacy really a thing of the past as Susannah says? Or is it still a fundamental right worth protecting? Coming up next in a sea of information, how to embrace privacy and even oblivion? I'm Anne Strainchamps and this is "To the best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. Do you care about your privacy enough to read through those long privacy policies before hitting the accept button? Well, don't worry, you're not the only one who's gotten careless. As we've moved ever deeper into the digital age, our collective view of privacy has shifted. How did that happen?

- It is now my honor to sign into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

- In the wake of the September 11th, terrorist attacks, we had this explosion of surveillance and also a lot of fear that seemed to justify it.

- This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, emails, the internet and cell phones.

- But it wasn't just tracking online activity or CCTV cameras or spies or whatever in the surveillance. It was also a kind of propaganda or ideology that came out. And that's the idea that privacy is for people who have something to hide.

- If you don't have anything to hide, then there is no real reason for you to be against the government monitoring emails, cell phone conversations.

- And my thought was, no hidings for those who have something to hide. Secrets are for keeping secrets, privacy's for something else. At the time I didn't know what privacy was for, it was hard for me to articulate. But the slogan just seemed so fatuous and it made me crazy that no one responded to that. I just wanted somebody to stand up in the halls of Congress or somewhere and just say, "No, hiding is for those "who have something to hide, not privacy." Right around the time of the Snowden disclosures about the massive program of NSA wire tapping, I had an interview on NPR with the journalist who broke the story.

- Glenn Greenwald thanks very much.

- Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

- The interviewer asked, "Well, do you have any evidence "that any of these people were harmed?"

- Are you able to document anyone who has been actively harmed by the National Security Agency?

- You know, did anything bad really happen here?

- Someone whose life was destroyed, for example, by information getting into the hands of that agency?

- My hair stood up. Well that's one question too many. I had the feeling that we had changed our view of what privacy means, what its value is. We'd forgotten why we cared about privacy.

- Lowry Pressley is a philosopher and political theorist who teaches at Stanford. He argues that privacy is not just a fundamental right, but a tool for living our best possible lives. Because in his view, privacy isn't only about protecting personal data, it's about choosing how much of it we even wanna generate in the first place. How do we become less known? What would it mean to embrace oblivion? These are questions he poses in his book, "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life." Here's producer Charles Monroe-Kane.

- You use a word, it's in the title of your book actually, and I'd like to dig at this word for a second because it's oblivion. Your book is called "The Right to Oblivion," not the Right to Privacy. So oblivion, what is that? Oblivion is one way that things cannot be known. It's a type of unknowing. In the same way that the corresponding way of not knowing something, we would say is obliviousness. And the reason, if I can back up a second, the reason for using oblivion, which is basically what I say privacy protects and produces in society, is that I think we've lost sight of the fact that different modes of concealment, different ways a thing can be unknown are meaningfully different. They create a different kind of society. So things can be secret, hidden, private, anonymous, mysterious or so on. And we can also be, in relation to those things, we can be confused or suspicious, oblivious, like I said, obtuse, forgetful. And so these different ways of not knowing a thing are different ways we value, have significant implications in how our society's structured and what kind of selves we have, thinking back to that point about the human rights. So let me lemme give you an example, and to sort of foreground this example. What we think about privacy, when we're thinking about privacy in the digital age as the control of information, preventing information from getting to certain people or whatever like we're thinking with the privacy settings on Facebook or Instagram. Really what we're thinking of is secrecy. Secrets are for protecting information. Confidentiality describes norms of where that information should properly go. Privacy we might want to assume, describes something else. So to say what oblivion is. Say we have a friend, think about the difference between talking about his private life and his secret life. So when we say about his private life, it's hard to say what we're talking about, what object there is, because we don't know. By contrast, if we say his secret life, there's something discreet there. There's something he's hiding. Maybe it's a secret family or an affair or some weird hobbies he wants to hide from us or whatever. But if it turns out he doesn't have a secret, if it turns out there're no weird hobbies or a secret second family, then actually he doesn't have a secret life, the secret life vanishes. But you can't say the same thing about his private life. There's no counterfactual about our friend we can say that would make his private life evaporate. And that's because what privacy protects isn't some kind of information that's hidden from other people. And I think this is just what we generally think, but it protects a kind of unknowing where we don't know what we don't know and we're not suspicious of it either. And I call that oblivion to distinguish it from the other forms of unknowing for a couple reasons. One is that just drawing from the root and oldest meaning of the term oblivion, is what's forgotten. And it's not something that's forgotten for a minute that can come back to you, it's like what's lost to memory. It's used in other aspects, you know, sleep or death. Things that are gone beyond the powers of human perception and knowledge to get at them. It also corresponds to this sense of obliviousness, which we more easily use. And the oblivious person doesn't know what he doesn't know. So that's what you want. When we want privacy, we don't want people snooping at our closed drapes or listening at our windows or wondering what's on our laptop when they can't see it. What we want, is them to be oblivious to that part of our lives that we keep private. So the point of using oblivion, is on the one hand to draw out the difference of what privacy protects in society and the difference what secrecy or data control or these kind of things protect. Because they're different and in our practices, the way we live privacy, it shows that they're different. I just think we've forgotten it. And then on the second hand, I think they're actually some goods to oblivion. I think oblivion is a good thing and lends our life on depth and all kinds of opportunities for flourishing that we'd be worse off without.

- You know, I had an experience about a year ago. I decided to grow out my beard. So I have this big old beard. And eventually you're like, "Oh, I need some beard products 'cause my face is itchy." And I do a bunch of research and like, okay, the only place I'm gonna get these beard products are on Amazon. I don't use Amazon very much. But I'm on my laptop and I order a brush and a comb and a couple beard products from a couple different companies. So I go to Facebook like seconds later, Instagram as well. And I'm inundated with ads that are manly, right?

- Yeah.

- Like one ad was for an ax, other beard products, but also like manly stuff. Stuff that like men living in the outback would have, you know, whatever. It really bothered me, I have to admit. Now am I aware of how algorithm works and how Instagram and Facebook and, of course I am. I'm even aware that they take information about you and for ads, I felt so exposed. Not only did I feel exposed and upset, which surprised me, I also felt I had no recourse. What about those words? What about feeling exposed and more importantly, what about the recourse part? I feel like I had no control over my privacy and I was deeply upset. What do you do with that?

- I have the same feeling. And it's interesting that that feeling and that way of describing it, exposure, but also invasion or violation goes back to the very earliest days of thinking about the value of privacy that emerged in the 19th century in reaction to really the snapshot camera and the development of newspapers, the first mass media, but also a big sprawling public record that information is entered into. And ever since, maybe the last third of the 19th century, people have been complaining in privacy's name about different types of developments, technological developments, information technology developments that they felt exposed their lives or violated their privacy in some way. And the interesting thing is, okay, you might think taking pictures through someone's bedroom window exposes them or getting the information off their laptop. But the majority of the developments that people complained about as being exposing in this bad way, concerned public activity or information we give out freely. In a sense, you bought the beard products in public, you know, on Amazon at least it wasn't secret.

- Right.

- And so from all sorts of things, so like getting your picture taken in public, the census, development of driver's licenses, databases in the 1970s was a big one, all kinds of things along these lines. And it raises a big question, in what sense are you being exposed? So one way of getting to that question, is asking, "Well, what's shared in all of those cases?"

- Yes.

- It's not that something goes from hidden behind a barrier to seen out in the world. It's not that it goes from secret to known, even from like the private of the house to the public of the street. What happens in all of those cases is that a piece of information about you is created where there wasn't one before. And that feels exposing in some way. But the next question is, well what is being exposed? What's being violated? What's being invaded in this case? Just a piece of information is being created. And those 19th century thinkers that we've sort of gotten are, I guess commentators. They weren't professional thinkers, they were ordinary citizens writing in the newspapers. They had an idea that something was lost when the sort of flux of everyday life, of living memory and so on. You know, we forget, we don't remember exactly, our memory is mutable in normal interactions, attains the fixity of information and especially when somebody else does it for you.

- Yeah.

- So in your case, to use that example, if in the pre-Amazon days you might have gone to a store, a men's product store and got a comb and beard lather or whatever. The clerk would try to remember your name, they would know you. There might be a record of the transaction in the form of a receipt. But that would be it. And maybe he would forget you. Maybe he would misremember your name. Maybe he would remember you as somebody that bought a thousand times more beard products than you did. But it was fluid in a way that information isn't. I think our intuition is still the same as it has been since sort of the beginning that something's lost, when we turn to information.

- Lowry, I'm really not a cynical person, so I'm about to ask a cynical question, but I'm really not. And I have a rosy view I think of the future in a humanity. But look, we don't have privacy and we're not gonna get it back. Right?

- I mean, I wouldn't say that's cynical so much as, you know, defeatist.

- Sorry.

- I think the truth is, and this is probably the truth at all points in human life, that it could always get worse.

- Thanks man. That's great. Thanks.

- See, I'm not cynical either. That's-

- You're a realist, aren't you?

- This is the beginning of a statement of optimism.

- Okay.

- It could always get worse. So that gives us reason always to fight for a better world, a better world which is more just more open to the flourishing of wide plurality, of different ways of being human. And you see movements for that in all sorts of areas of life today. And I think privacy is one of them. I just think the digital world is so young, the world we're complaining about, about the bank.

- That's true

- Complaining about Instagram. You know, you and I were born not that long ago in a world where none of that existed. And so we were kind of bold over by it, by its novelty. We also believed the sloganeering of the people who stood to become billionaires from it. That it was gonna connect the world and make the world a better place and bring peace and meaningfulness rather than war and genocide and alienation. We bought it for a little while. So that slowed us down. I think those scales have fallen from our eyes to a large extent. And I think the last thing that really stands in our way of at least of conceptualizing a better world, conceptualizing a solution to the problem. One step towards remedying the problem is just being able to see it for what it is. And that requires new ways of looking at them or new ways that could also be old ways. We have lessons and jewels to rescue from the past. I think one way that we could start to imagine it getting better is just to stop thinking that information is just this naturally occurring fact in our lives. In fact, it's something that's being done to us and it's being done to us for someone else's profit. So if we can stop taking for granted the fact that we are our data, that we are information, then we've raised a whole series of new moral and political problems at an earlier stage to the questions that we're asking now. So asking the right questions isn't halfway there, but you can't get there if you don't ask the right questions.

- Lowry Presley is a writer and lecturer at Stanford University. His book is called "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life" Up Next. When you die, you can't take your data with you.

- It's changing fundamentally how we think about the dead, how we relate to the dead, and really what it means to be a dead person.

- Carl Ohman is a Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University in Sweden.

- You can say that the relationship to the dead that we're exiting right now, is modernity. And modernity by death scholars is referred to as the era of forbidden death, where the dead are to be hidden from public view. We move cemeteries from the middle of the city to the outskirts of the city. But what's happening now with the internet is that the dead all of a sudden are all around us. They're in our pockets, literally in our photo libraries, in our smartphones. They're emerging on social media.

- So cute.

- Their data are filling up the servers of the internet everywhere. So the era of modernity where we tried to hide the dead, that is over and we are now confronted with the question, what do we do with all these digital remains that surround us?

- Where's mom? Can I talk to her?

- Coming up next, a glimpse into the afterlife of data. I'm Anne Strainchamps and this is "To the Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. There are approximately 1.4 billion iPhone users worldwide, over 3 billion Facebook users. And in the next few decades, many of them will die, leaving behind years of text threads with loved ones, precious photos and videos stored on phones and cloud servers. The data that is our memory. So what happens to all of it? Steve Paulson sat down with Carl Ohman, author of "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When you die and Why You Should Care."

- So the obvious thing that I see is if I go on Facebook and there's a Facebook friend who has died, that person tends to still be on Facebook and I get alerts when that person's birthday comes up, even though I know they're not around anymore. But can you give me some other examples of these digital remains?

- Well, what comes to mind when most people hear about this topic is, "Oh, so like what you do with your Facebook data "or what's gonna happen to my tweets or my Instagram feed?" And sure like these are all very significant forms of digital remains. But there are all kinds of data that you're generating without even knowing it. If you have an iPhone, you probably have the Apple Health app installed, which comes with every iPhone. That app tracks every step that you're taking. So somewhere on a server, there's a pretty accurate picture of how fit you've been across the years. Every time you move and change places your phone's gonna register that. So your geo data is also constantly logged, everywhere. And even more so when it comes to biological data. I personally am a diabetic, and so I have all my blood glucose data on a very detailed basis in an app on my phone. And all that data is on a server somewhere owned by a company. And a lot of people put their DNA in the hands of companies. I think ancestry.com has 26 million people's DNA.

- Yeah.

- And we ought to remember that's not just information about those 26 million, but virtually about everyone in their biological surroundings. So their parents, their children, their siblings, and so on and so on. So this is our digital footprint, not just the stuff that you can see that you immediately think of, but basically everything you do.

- So there's all this, reams and the reams of data. I guess the question is then, what happens after we die? What happens to that data?

- I find it a very interesting question and it can be practically challenging for a person to find, just like where is all the data? Who owns it? If someone has a Gmail account, can I access those emails, playlists, avatars, and video games? There may be heaps of data that you don't even know about. But it also has this really interesting, I think, collective angle. It's not only a question of who owns and controls your personal digital remains, but it's rather also a question about who owns our digital remains, our collective remains as a society and a culture.

- On one level, I kind of think, who cares if I have all this health data, for instance on my phone, I die. That seems irrelevant to anyone once I'm gone. So it seems like, okay, there was all this incredibly detailed information about me, but who would care anymore? You are taking this to an entirely different level when you say there's also a collective question about all of this.

- Yeah. And for the record, like I think the personal level is quite important too. Bear in mind that all of this data can be used to draw a lot of inferences about, for instance, your children when you're gone. Your data is not only about you, it's also about all of your descendants and can be used to draw inferences about them, to manipulate them, and so on and so on.

- Is that happening? Are people using this mining, this data to actually find out about other family members who are not directly part of this data set?

- That is not to my knowledge happening right now, but that is probably because it's not lucrative enough thus far. Because when you look at it, maybe like a hundred million social media users have died, give or take. But in the next few decades we're gonna look at several hundred million users on Facebook, potentially billions of dead users. And this is a one, two, or three decade horizon. Sooner or later these incentives are going to emerge. And it's a very much like an economic reality. I mentioned ancestry.com and there are 26 million DNA profiles. Yes that's lucrative now because people keep paying for the services. But imagine if ancestry were gonna, let's say go bankrupt. Okay, what happens then?

- Right.

- Well, same thing that happens in every bankruptcy. An administrator comes in and sells off, auctions out all the valuable assets. What are the valuable assets in this case? Well, data, of course. We're setting ourselves up to a trap in thinking that the data of the dead is unrelated to the privacy of the living. This is very much connected. And in the next few years, I think we're gonna regret overlooking this issue a lot. The dead have no data privacy rights, whatsoever.

- So what are the potential problems down the road then if the companies do own this data and actually are in the position of selling the data?

- Hmm. So one of the problems of course would be that you can be hacked by proxy from your deceased relatives. But what I think is actually more important is the collective level. Take this hypothetical example, or not even hypothetical example, like very real example of the MeToo campaign. So the MeToo movement was a huge event in 21st century feminism and future historians of course are gonna want to study what happened. What were these testimonies about? Who spoke out? What were their reactions? Now, one person owns the entirety of these testimonies on a global level, and that person is Elon Musk.

- Hmm.

- So when future historians want to understand our collective digital past, they're gonna have to go through one person who's the gatekeeper of all these collectively assembled events and movements.

- Wait, how does Elon Musk own all of this?

- Because he owns the Tweets.

- Okay.

- He is the sole owner of now X. So he's gonna be the person who controls, okay, who can gain access to the data sets. And that's the position that we're in as a society, that the Musks and the Zuckerbergs, they're not only controlling our present communication infrastructure, they're also the future monopolists of our collective past.

- So you're saying that when future, to take your example of the MeToo movement, those companies potentially can shape how history is being written.

- Exactly.

- I wanna explore this idea of whether our ideas of death and the dead are actually changing because of all of this. Now you're talking about what happens to the data after people are gone. There are also all of these efforts to create lifelike simulations of people who have died, our loved ones to actually interact with those people. And it raises all kinds of questions about how do we grieve? Does this help us grieve, or is it the opposite? Because in a way, maybe we're trying to act as if our loved ones have not actually died, that they're still with us.

- There is certainly this element of death denial in the emergence of these bots impersonating the dead. And there have been voices raised that this is changing grieving practices for the worse in that we can never reach closure in that the dead is always there for us.

- To take one example, I mean I came across the story of Laurie Anderson, the performance artist who has made a chatbot of her late husband, the musician, Lou Reed, who died in 2013. And apparently in this chatbot, she's feeding in his writings, his songs, his interviews, so she can actually carry on a conversation writing songs with him in a way. And I know she said that most of what comes out of this is really pretty stupid, but about 15% is really interesting. And she has become obsessed with this.

- Yeah, it may sound very high tech and difficult, but anyone can basically do this with ChatGPT. You can just take a conversation log that you have with someone, a couple of thousands of messages back and forth, upload that document and it's gonna replicate that person. It's really not that inaccessible.

- I have a couple of reactions to the Laurie Anderson example. I mean, if she wants to do this and she finds it comforting or nourishing in some way, all power to her, you know, why not? But it also seems like maybe she's trying to hang on to her dead husband, when she should just be letting him go.

- Yeah, I mean I would push back slightly on that type of reaction because it is very much a kind of modernist way of approaching what grieving should be. I mentioned before that in modernity the presence of the dead is seen as illegitimate. You know, if someone dies, yes, you can grieve for a certain period, but then you should let go. You should get back to normal, as if normal is the absence of death and the absence of the presence of the dead. And keeping a dialogue with the dead online is therefore seen as some kind of pathological inability to let go or find closure. But I don't think that's a helpful approach because there are many ways of grieving what is considered a normal relationship to the dead that is certainly not historically or culturally fixed, but will change over the next hundred years as it has changed fundamentally over the past 100 or 150 years.

- Yeah. Carl, do any of these questions hit home for you personally? You know, if you have dead relatives or loved ones who might wanna live on in some digital fashion or you wanna have some connection to them, or you worry about your own data living on past you, I mean, just how personal does all of this get for you?

- It's an interesting question. I've gotten it a few times over the years. For the first couple of years, my answer would just be, no, this is a philosophically stimulating topic. I think the political stakes are very high, but I'm not that concerned on a personal level. The first time that begun to change was in 2019 when a colleague and I published a study where we projected the number of dead Facebook users over the course of the 21st century. And I remember parsing through the data, and I got to Sweden in the 1980s males, and it suddenly hit me that one of these data points is me.

- Right.

- I'm one of these deaths. And I was like, "Oh, wow, this actually has to do with me." It's not just this bird's eye political collective matter. I'm in here. And the second epiphany that I had on like an emotional level was when I had my kids. And I realized, so my oldest is three by now, which is like right about when you have your first permanent memories that are gonna last for the rest of your life. But I realize that if I die now, like if I walk out and I'm hit by a car, my kids are probably not gonna have one single tangible memory of me throughout their rest of their lives. They're gonna be told stories about me, but they're not gonna have any first person memory of what it was like interacting with me. And that was the first time I thought, "Hang on, maybe I should go on and use one of these apps "to create a virtual avatar of myself." Not because my kids are gonna use it to grieve or anything like that. But I would've liked them to know what it was like having a conversation with their dad. And maybe not so much for their sake, but rather for my sake of just knowing that they would've known. And that was the second time, it really emotionally hit me that, this really has something to do with me.

- Yeah. And that's a really strong argument for the value of living on digitally for your children. It will change their memories, it'll change their relationship with you after you're gone.

- Yeah, very much so.

- Fascinating. This is a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much.

- Oh, thank you.

- Carl Ohman is a Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University in Sweden, and he's the author of "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should care." And that was Steve Paulson talking with him. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Our producers are Angelo Bautista, Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane, and our technical director is Joe Hardtke with Help from Sarah Hopeful. Additional Music this week comes from Al the seek night and Iliac. The executive producer of "To the Best of Our Knowledge" is Steve Paulson and I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening and join us again next time.