After the Internet： Can my QQ Weibo WeChat Alipay be passed down from family to family？
People’s livelihood investigation bureau
Editor’s note:
This is the People’s Livelihood Investigation Bureau, which has never been seen before, investigating the changes in people’s livelihood. Pay attention to what you want to pay attention to and what you don’t, and investigate what you want to see and what you don’t see.
Chinanews. com client Beijing, May 7 th:After the Internet: Can my QQ Weibo WeChat Alipay be passed down from family to family?
Author Zhang Xu
In the network buzzwords, there is such a sentence "You want to laugh me to death so as to inherit my the glory of the king/emoticon pack". Although it is a joke, after all, birth, illness and death are inevitable natural laws.
What will happen to QQ WeChat Weibo Alipay account after our death? What should we do with the cloud disk full of files and the hard-working game account? This information, which used to be digital property, has become digital heritage behind us. They used to belong to me, but can they really be passed on to future generations?
What is digital heritage?
According to a survey of Japan’s NHK TV station close-up Modern Plus, 55% of Japanese netizens are uneasy about how to deal with digital heritage. At the same time, 95.2% netizens don’t know what to do with digital heritage.
What is digital heritage? As early as 2003, UNESCO gave the answer in the Charter for the Preservation of Digital Heritage — — Personal information on the Internet, including texts, databases, photos, software, web pages, etc., is a digital heritage.
Generally speaking, digital heritage can be divided into material and spiritual categories. Material digital heritage refers to virtual currency directly linked to money, such as Alipay balance and Bitcoin. The spirit is social accounts, personal files and so on.
The former is based on real wealth, while the latter involves the privacy of the deceased and the contacts in the account. At present, there is no conclusion on the handling of such inheritance.
Do parents have the right to inherit their children’s accounts?
With the life of more and more Internet users coming to an end, how to deal with digital heritage, especially account digital heritage, has become a difficult problem for people.
In July 2018, a paper judgment of the German Federal Supreme Court attracted global attention: a German couple obtained the inheritance right of their late daughter’s social media account. In order to obtain this verdict, this lawsuit has been going on for five years.
In 2012, a 15-year-old girl was crushed and killed by a subway in Berlin. Her parents suspected that their daughter was being bullied and applied for access to the deceased’s Facebook account to view information, but the account was locked, so they took Facebook to court.
The lawsuit has experienced many twists and turns: in 2015, the court asked Facebook to provide relevant data on girls; In 2017, the Berlin Court of Appeal held that the privacy of online accounts was protected by the Constitution; On July 12, 2018, the German federal court finally ruled that Facebook must allow the girl’s parents to enter as account heirs.
Based on emotional factors, people may support the parents, but for internet companies, once allowing others to access user data and information, it means huge legal and moral risks.
Wang Sixin, a professor at Communication University of China, told the reporter: "Social accounts contain a large number of personal and related contacts’ privacy, and the right to privacy is protected by the Constitution, which takes precedence over the demands made by family members in justice. In terms of emotional value, account inheritance is a way for family members to mourn, so in the future practice, we should try to strike a balance between protecting user privacy and family members’ emotional demands. "
For this reason, Internet giants such as Facebook and Google have launched proxy services in recent years, allowing users to set managers before their death to deal with the digital legacy behind them, but the rights do not include consulting private information such as personal chat records.
In contrast, Apple seems to be "inhuman". In addition to stipulating in iCloud that "your account and/or password details shall not be shared with others", it also specifically indicates "no survivor has the right to obtain it", that is, after the account holder dies, Apple will terminate the iCloud account and delete all contents.
Can QQ WeChat Weibo be passed down from family to family?
Not long ago, when QQ launched the cancellation function, many netizens said that "QQ is full of youth, not only will it not be cancelled, but it will also be passed on to children". However, according to the existing regulations, this wish may be dashed.
Professor Wang Sixin told reporters that, unlike traditional heritage, account digital heritage relies on third parties to provide platforms and services, and property rights are not independent. "At present, the common practice is that users only have the right to use without ownership. The specific operation still depends on the negotiation between users and platforms."
The reporter combed and found that according to the Weibo user agreement, if it is not used for 90 consecutive days, Weibo has the right to dispose of the account, including recycling nicknames, recycling accounts and stopping providing services.
It is worth noting that in 2017, an article in @ micro-blogging service aimed at the stolen Weibo who went to the Expo showed that after relatives provided relevant certificates, it could help to retrieve the account of the deceased and even hand it over to the new holder.
The relevant terms of WeChat and QQ user agreement show that users only have the right to use the account, and the ownership belongs to Tencent; Users cannot transfer their accounts to others; If the account is not logged in for a long time, Tencent has the right to withdraw it. If there is money in the account, the heir can contact customer service and inherit the money in the account after submitting relevant certificates (such as ID card, death certificate and relationship certificate).
In other words, apart from the balance, in theory, your Weibo QQ WeChat account itself cannot be left to your children as a family heirloom.
Is it possible to realize "digital immortality"?
In the English drama "Black Mirror", in order to alleviate the grief of her boyfriend’s death, her girlfriend used her data to simulate her "boyfriend" with artificial intelligence. This "boyfriend" has the same tone as a real boyfriend. Playing the same joke is like living in a virtual space in digital form. This is the more advanced application of digital heritage — — "Digital immortality".
According to Li Zhaoxin, a partner of the Future Affairs Administration, the idea of collecting enough data in Black Mirror, rebuilding the virtual image of the deceased and even imitating their thinking mode is very likely to become a reality in the future.
In fact, The New York Times reporter James had a virtual conversation with his father who died of cancer through similar technology. When his father was still alive, James recorded his father’s voice and established a corpus of his life. The robot simulated it through analysis and calculation, and the family could chat with this "eternal" father at any time to comfort their grief.
In February 2015, Russian engineer Roman, born in 1981, died because of an unexpected car accident. He didn’t leave much information for his friends to remember on social networks, but he left a lot of short messages and photos.
In order to commemorate him, Kuyda, a good friend who works for artificial intelligence Luka company, won the support of relatives and friends and added 8,000 chat messages collected from different fields to the robot project. After deep learning and other training, the robot released in 2017 has been able to simulate Roman tone and human dialogue.
Should the dead rest in peace or survive in another way?
It looks beautiful for relatives and friends to mourn through "digital immortality", but what follows is the controversy caused by this matter.
Opponents said that, first of all, Roman didn’t know that his information would be used to make robots. Secondly, considering that even strangers can download Luka to ask Roman some very private topics, this commemorative way is disturbing the peace after his death.
Coincidentally, in 2019, Weibo, a girl killed by Egypt Air, was besieged by cyber violence, and the situation was very similar to that faced by Roman.
On April 19th, 2019, the National Museum of China and Sina Weibo announced that all Weibo contents will be preserved as digital memory and digital heritage. Some people in the science fiction circle said that if the stored information is rich enough, it is not impossible to make robots by using the retained information and simulate the user’s tone to send Weibo.
The attitude of netizens is also polarized, and some people are happy: we have also participated in national projects; Some people worry that there are too many secrets in the account, even if they die, they have to get up and format the data.
These disputes and cases all point to a question: Is it right to use the information of users before their death to realize "digital immortality"?
In this regard, Wang Qi, a lecturer at Beihang Law School, believes that the network has the ability to keep every trace of people’s lives, and the digital heritage is also exposed and snooped.
He said that it should be a basic protection of citizens by law to eliminate people’s traces in the online world before their death, or to keep them in an undisclosed state. The "digital heritage" contains the "digital remains" of the deceased, and this "digital remains" is expected to get eternal rest under the system of communication confidentiality and the protection of personality rights.
If one day, technology can achieve real "digital immortality", how would you choose?