Leave silver surfers to their own devices – ‘til death do them part

Mobile phones – you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them….and now it transpires you might still need one even after you die.

And it’s all because there are those among us who like to upload every mundane facet of their extraordinary lives onto a social media site so the rest of us can go green with envy.

But the problem arises when they pop their clogs – and the voracious social media beast still demands regular feeding, unless you can change the owner’s status to ‘departed’.

The problem then is that so many mobile devices are no longer accessed by a simple password; now it’s fingerprint or retina recognition.

That has led to bereaved families asking undertakers to use the corpse’s fingers to activate identity sensors.

It’s all with the best of intentions; just to allow access for long enough to post a final message or even a death notice so that those Facebook friends are in the loop too.

Unfortunately that can prove futile because the sensors usually work by detecting an electrical charge running through the skin – which clearly is no longer the case for the corpse.

It’s even trickier with Apple’s new face ID on the iPhone X which works using natural eye movement – so good luck with your efforts to activate that by moving it over a deceased relative’s face.

And it’s not just about notifying connections of the news.

It’s also so that you can retain those digital memories, given that so many people now store photographs, music and memories on their devices as opposed to the old days, when the records were stacked on shelves and the photos were either framed or stuffed in drawers.

The conundrum has already seen solicitors in the UK drawing up ‘digital wills’ that also record passwords and passcodes to devices such as iPads.

And they also advise clients to back up their precious data on cloud storage, so that it can be more easily accessed by family members after their death.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.