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Business Daily

Your digital legacy

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4796 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The companies managing your online life after death. Ed Butler speaks to Tom Ainsworth, CEO of Memories, an online memorial service that provides messages from beyond the grave, and to Rikard Steiber, founder of startup GoodTrust, which aims to help people take control of their digital legacies. Pyschologist Dr Elaine Kasket discusses the phenomenon of online death in the age of the pandemic, and why online legacies may be less permanent than we think.

(Photo: A funeral is livestreamed in Austria earlier this year, Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is the sound of climate change.

0:05.0

Find out what it all means at the end of this podcast.

0:15.0

Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

0:19.0

Today, the firms seeking to fix your legacy from

0:23.2

beyond the grave. For the history of mankind, there's been a question around what's it all for? What's my

0:29.4

legacy? What was my purpose? So what I think we've created is an ability for someone to take ownership

0:35.9

of that. It seems like a growing trend, but is the pandemic responsible?

0:40.7

People are being confronted with the reality of their mortality.

0:45.4

And we also have a situation where people aren't just living online, but they are literally

0:49.7

dying online. People are having virtual memorials. They're having live stream funerals.

0:54.6

Well, less we forget, that's Business Daily from the BBC.

1:00.6

You probably won't have missed this one amongst the celebrity gossip of a couple of weeks ago.

1:05.8

Happy birthday, Kimberly. Look at you. You're 40 and all grown up. You look beautiful just like when you were a little girl.

1:15.2

I watch over you and your sisters and brother and the kids every day.

1:20.3

That's the sound of a computer-generated hologram, clearly looking and sounding the part of the late lawyer, Robert Kardashian,

1:28.5

created as a present for his daughter, Kim,

1:31.2

the reality TV star and businesswoman, to mark her 40th birthday.

1:35.2

It was, in her words, a memory that would last a lifetime.

1:38.8

I am so proud of the woman that you've become, Kimberly, and all that you've accomplished.

1:46.1

The hologram resurrection certainly divided public opinion on social media.

1:50.2

To some, it was a powerful and extraordinary idea, to others a bit creepy, frankly.

1:55.2

But amidst a growing pandemic, it certainly struck a chord.

...

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