Who should own your digital legacy (for example, your Facebook page or tweets) and manage your “digital afterlife” once you are deceased? As opposed to standard legal inheritance, this paper elaborately explores the option to employ so-called “stewards” to that purpose. They should “act as mediators for the wishes of the deceased and their data, as well as moderators of the actions, needs, and requests of other survivors.”

Twenty study participants having experienced the death of a Facebook friend were asked to put themselves into the position of such a steward. With the help of sketches from a (fictitious) postmortem data management social network application, the participants then identified perspectives and issues on the transition to such a stewardship and the role itself.

Four primary duties of a steward emerge: “honoring the last requests of the deceased, providing information surrounding the death, preserving the memory of the deceased, and facilitating memorial practices of survivors.” However, due to its very position in the middle between the (perceived) needs of the deceased, the expectations of the survivors, and the legal heirs, the role is fraught with ambiguities and is quite complex.

While this (hypothetical) derivation is presented vividly (including short transcriptions of typical responses) and soundly, I fail to see why a steward is needed at all. Contrary to the abstract and the summary of the paper, the authors do not present any argument to that effect: any heir could act in this role. In addition, the spirit of the paper seems to assume a right of survivors to access the deceased’s social media content also postmortem, but there simply is no such claim.

Nevertheless, stewardship proves to be an interesting concept and might not only serve in drafting one’s will but other contexts as well.