JOIN USGhost writer! A new application will soon allow users to keep posting Twitter updates even from beyond the grave.
The app independently uses intricate knowledge of a person’s on-line character to create a virtual continuation of their personality after death.
“When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting,” says the new application’s tagline.
To be launched in March, the app called LivesOn uses Twitter bots powered by algorithms that analyse your on-line behaviour and learn how you speak, the Guardian reported.
It will keep on scouring the Internet, favouriting tweets and posting the sort of links you like, creating a personal digital afterlife.
“It divides people on a gut level, before you even get to the philosophical and ethical arguments,” said Dave Bedwood, creative partner of Lean Mean Fighting Machine, the London-based ad agency that is developing it.
“It offends some, and delights others. Imagine if people started to see it as a legitimate but small way to live on. Cryogenics costs a fortune; this is free and I’d bet it will work better than a frozen head,” Bedwood said.
Mia Smith, a business owner in her mid-40s, has already registered her interest. For her, it is the chance to have a “kind of ironic legacy” that drew her in.
“But I’m not sure who’d be interested in reading a computer-generated ‘me’,” she said.
The growth of “digital legacies” is already throwing up legal and ethical issues: it’s a violation of many websites’ terms of service for surviving relatives to go on using your passwords.
Social networking site Facebook has already gone to court to oppose the idea that families can force it to hand over data, the report said.
People who sign up for LivesOn is asked to nominate an executor who will have control of the account. Another service, DeadSocial, puts the power in the deceased’s hands.
The report said it is a “digital legacy tool” that lets you set up a series of messages to be sent out posthumously, via Facebook and Twitter.