Alexis Elder – Data After Death: Remembrance & Resurrection

How should we engage with people’s data after death? Information ethicists have emphasized the social nature of data – data about you is also data about your friends, loved ones, relationships and community, making it difficult to assign ownership to individual bits of data. Privacy theorists have urged us to move beyond a simplistic public/private model of information flow, emphasizing the importance of context and relationality in thinking about norms around privacy. Elder draws on Daoist philosophical accounts of interconnectedness to help move beyond individualist accounts of data stewardship for the dead, and reflect on the roles data can play in remembrance.

Alexis M. Elder is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her research focuses on interpersonal relationships and social technologies. Her publications include “Conversation from Beyond the Grave? A Neo‐Confucian Ethics of Chatbots of the Dead” in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, and “Zhuangzi on Friendship and Death” in Southern Journal of Philosophy, and a book, Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves, published by Routledge. She has appeared on KQED, CBC, WNYC, BBC 4 and KUMD to discuss issues related to personal relationships and technology ethics.

This was the third part of the Data Deluge: Privacy in a Connected World series at UW–Superior. This event was presented both in-person and via YouTube livestream. For more information, visit uwsuper.edu/alexis-elder.