The crime remained unsolved, but the victim’s Facebook profile remained active.

Someone murdered Jean Tuggy, 61, who lived alone, back in 2016 in her home just outside of State College, Pa. In addition to the tornado of grief and shock over her death, her family had to absorb the social media response to her death. Her daughter Bekah Tuggy Fisher recalled that the news rippled onto her mother’s Facebook profile page, where people were posting outraged and heartbroken notes. 

“I had to deal with seeing people question if the police were doing their job,” Fisher remembered. “I had to deal with people bringing my father’s innocence into question. It wasn’t just on my mom’s Facebook page; it was also on different crime-solver pages on Facebook and other platforms, and in the comments sections of online newspapers. It was a really weird time.” 

The Facebook aspect of it was both “a huge help” and also “horribly difficult,” Fisher said. Facebook gave her the relief of not having to communicate the news about her mother’s death with many people in person, but she also had to absorb the “Facebook-public’s feelings and their assumptions about my feelings,” which were complicated because of a rough relationship with her mother. 

Jean Tuggy’s profile remains active, now as a memorial page where her Facebook friends can post. Three years later, Fisher will still see notifications of posts on her mother’s Facebook page, and, as her mother’s murder is still unsolved, “the weirdness and tension hasn’t completely gone away.”

Social media after death is something few people consider until someone close to them dies. As the Tuggy family found, family and loved ones must suddenly deal with the emotional effects, including the question of the deceased loved one’s ongoing digital presence amid the grieving process. On Facebook’s settings page, for example, users can choose to have their accounts deleted upon their death or to have them become memorial pages—a recent development over the last few years for Facebook. 

Practically speaking, according to estate lawyers, few people prepare their digital accounts for their death. Grocery store rewards, email, a YouTube channel, a Facebook account, cryptocurrency, cloud storage, and virtual property in a video game like Fortnite—all of these things are what lawyers call “digital assets,” and people don’t think to include them in their estate planning. 

Many people share passwords to their accounts with family members or executors, but someone logging in to an account who is not the account holder is essentially a hacker under federal law. Recently a client gave estate lawyer Scott Magnuson all her passwords, since she was designating him as the executor of her estate, but he would be wary about using them: “I could be committing a crime.” 

And laws governing such items are stuck in the 1980s, although states are just now starting to pass new laws that give executors more power to manage digital accounts. Without states providing legal access to digital assets for executors, tech companies are often obligated to lock or delete accounts. 

“You might lose your email, your pictures, your cloud … even cryptocurrency,” said Magnuson, who practices in Pennsylvania, which is one of the few states that has no statutes about digital assets. “It’s a newer concept. Most people … don’t consider their email to be something to do estate planning around.” 

Gerry Beyer, an estate expert at Texas Tech School of Law, compares people’s digital lives now to “the house of a hoarder,” in an extensive document titled Cyber Estate Planning and Administration. Digital assets can be “almost literally, infinite,” and every digital asset “requires different means of access.” 

The rules for access often come under a company’s terms of service agreement (TOSA), and those agreements vary widely. Apple’s iCloud TOSA says that data will be deleted after a death, as does Yahoo’s. Facebook allows users to memorialize pages. Google allows users to designate someone to have access to their accounts after death.

Google’s euphemism for someone dying is if you’re “unexpectedly unable to use your Google account.” After a certain period of inactivity on a user’s Google account, the company will send an email to the user’s designated Google “heir” outlining which Google services—YouTube, Drive, Gmail—you granted the person access to. 

Estate lawyers I talked to compared each account to a different safety deposit box for which you need different keys. The item in the box might belong to you, but you have to have the key. If you had, say, a document on Google Drive, that is your document, but if you don’t designate someone to have access to your Drive account, Google can’t grant access to the document after your death. One extreme example: Composer Leonard Bernstein had a manuscript of his memoir in a password-protected file on his computer when he died; no one has been able to crack the password.

In one case from 2011, a Wisconsin couple sued Facebook and Google to gain access to their son’s accounts after he took his own life without leaving any physical notes or writing that would explain his death. The father, Jay Stassen, said the couple was looking for “some kind of peace of mind.” Tech companies have been wary to release private data when a user hasn’t designated anyone access, but Google released the info to the grieving parents. (Stassen told the Duluth News Tribune that “nothing we have found so far has resolved in our minds what might have been happening.”)

Lawyers Justin H. Brown and Ross Bruch described this account access problem in an article titled “Administering Estates with Digital Assets.” In the course of drafting the article they used Microsoft Word, iPhones, Dropbox, Yahoo email, Comcast email, and Google Docs—all tools from companies with different terms of service.

“What if one or both of the authors had died in the process of writing the article—how would their executors access the article?” they asked. “What if, instead of an article (which we acknowledge has little monetary value), we were collaborating over a priceless manuscript or a musical score or groundbreaking medical research?”

Estate lawyer Magnuson, who is also an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, encourages Christian clients to be “good stewards of what you’re given”—many Christians neglect estate planning entirely, he said.