Lazarus Archive
Digital estates
Most people now leave behind dozens of accounts, thousands of messages and photographs, and a growing number of models trained on their words. What happens to it all should not be decided by terms of service.
The half-life of a digital estate
Working with partner archives, Lazarus traced what happened to the accounts of 2,000 people who died between 2004 and 2024.
| Time since death | Accounts still accessible |
|---|---|
| After 1 year | |
| After 5 years | |
| After 10 years | |
| After 20 years |
Lazarus estate study, 2,000 estates, 2004–2024. Roughly half of what remains is lost every five years, and almost none of the loss was deliberate. It was simply nobody’s job to stop it.
Two rights, and a default
The Half-Life brief proposes a framework for digital estates in three parts. Data that has been kept can always be deleted later; data that has been deleted cannot be brought back. So the default leans, gently, toward keeping.
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A right to be remembered
Some people want their work kept, their correspondence available to historians and their photographs passed to their children. Their accounts and data should pass to their estate like any other property.
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A right to be forgotten
Others want their accounts closed, their messages deleted and nothing of them left to be simulated. That wish deserves the same respect, and the same force in law.
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A clear default
Most people never say which they want. Where there is no instruction, data should be preserved for the person’s heirs for ten years, and no replica of them should ever be made.
How Lazarus applies them
The Digital Lives collection holds the email, photographs, papers and messages of individual people: 705 records in the online catalog so far, 256 of them sealed. These rules apply to every one.
- Personal archives are accepted only from the person who made them, or from their estate.
- The creator or estate decides who may see an archive, and when. Lazarus honors those terms, including sealing an archive until a date they choose.
- Where a person left no instruction, their archive is kept for their heirs and opened to no one else for at least ten years.
- Material in the archive is never used to create, train or operate a conversational replica of anyone, living or dead, and partner archives agree to the same condition.
- A creator or estate may withdraw an archive at any time. It is deleted from all three copies, Vigil confirms the deletion, and the catalog keeps a note that something was withdrawn, but not what.
Visiting, not resurrecting
Services now offer to build conversational replicas of the dead from their messages and recordings. Some families find comfort in them; others discover a replica of a parent or child made without their knowledge. The Turing Registry already treats keeping a personality without consent as grounds for revocation.
Lazarus takes the view of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in Zürich, a partner archive since 2012: the records of the dead are there to be visited, read and listened to, but nothing new should ever be generated in their voice.
Write it down
The single most useful thing anyone can do is write one page, keep it with their will and tell someone where it is.
It does not need a form or a lawyer. It needs to say:
- Who should have access to your accounts and devices, and how to reach them.
- Where your important files are kept, including the copies.
- Whether you would like to be remembered, forgotten or simply left alone, and what that means for your email, photographs and messages.
- Whether you consent to any replica of you being made. If you say nothing, the answer should be no.
- Who should decide anything you have not covered.
The guide to your own digital archive covers the rest: copies, formats and keeping it up.
The brief’s recommendations
- Accounts and data should pass to a person’s estate by default, like any other property, unless they choose otherwise.
- Services that shut down should offer heirs a full export, and offer public-interest material to independent archives.
- No conversational replica of a person should be created or operated after their death without their recorded consent.
- Where a person left no instruction, data should be preserved for their heirs for ten years, and replicas should not be made.
Half-Life: What Happens to Our Data When We Die was published by Frothly in August 2026, written by Miranda Lawson and Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang.