Technology users will eventually face death in the offline world. However, their data may survive for a long time, recorded in a wide variety of digital services and devices. This digital legacy must be handled and legally abide by the owners' wishes, which may vary from inheritance to deletion. By carrying out a literature review on the subject, the authors noticed there is a lack of user studies on these issues. We, therefore, conducted a focus group with technology users of different profiles to understand the volunteers' acceptability of this topic. During the group discussions, an unexpected factor was raised: to what extent might a user's fame influence their digital immortalization? This study aims to discuss digital immortality in terms of its acceptability among users and to contribute to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with important insights on death in the digital world. In our findings regarding acceptability, users can feel some comfort in interacting with their deceased loved ones. Regarding fame, while influential individuals may not need digital immortality, there are concerns regarding the utilitarian nature of their legacies.

Abstract Death has become increasingly visible on social networks, especially after COVID-19, and Facebook addresses that with double standards: while some profiles remain active, others turn into memorials. This article investigates how Facebook’s system deals with dead users’ profiles either to support or restrict interactions concerning users’ deaths. Our qualitative analysis of data from 54 public profiles of people who died between June 2020 and March 2021 showed that (i) Facebook fails to communicate the criteria for transforming profiles into memorials; (ii) no information about their contacts of deceased users’ profiles is given; (iii) the frequency of interaction with memorials and with active profiles is different; (iv) profiles’ privacy settings shape interaction. Our results exemplify how a sociotechnical system influences people’s interactions with dead users’ profiles. We herein highlight implications for interaction design and evaluation, besides the need to consider interaction as existence, which raises big challenges to the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community.

This research intends to analyze how users that are also HCI designers relate to the interaction with digital memorials linked to graves through QRcodes.To do so, we have carried out an immersive practice in the Consolação Cemetery (São Paulo, Brazil), where that technology is used to tag the graves of famous deceased people and to guide the visitors in the site.Those QR code tags link the graves to an online application for digital memorials called MemoriAll.To address the problem, this paper analyzes the data collected from the surveys answered by the research subjects before and after the immersive practice, along with data from a semiotic inspection of MemoriAll.