More and more people are running a large majority of their lives online. That’s a fact. Privacy keeps cropping up as an issue from time to time. People place so much of their day to day information on places like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc that is made public. It is pretty easy these days to find out a lot about a person purely from putting their name into a search engine like Google and seeing what pops up.

We all know that recruiters are using this more and more to find out about potential employees. Of course, if you are in the job market, you have no doubt created a lovely LinkedIn profile – it’s very easy to forget that many of those pictures of the office party getting out of hand at Christmas have lots of tags of you…

Clearly this keeps cropping up in the news and you can enlist companies now that will clean up your social profile. Celebrities use this too when they want to turn the tide on a raft of bad publicity.

One thing this is often forgotten here, is what happens to all the social information when you die?

Occasionally you will see some news stories when someone has died suddenly and their page has been turned into a memorial by the family or friends, but it’s not always very easy to pick up someone’s Facebook page.

There’s a very interesting article on the BBC website today – Google launches tool to determine data use after death. It makes an interesting read.

It’s a sensitive issue but it Google are starting to go some way into dealing with what happens in the digital afterlife…