Logged out: The families fighting tech companies for answers about their loved ones

Jools Sweeney was 14 when his mother found him dead in his bedroom. Hours before he had been playing football with his friends and had later come home to toast marshmallows, an average fun-filled day for a teenager enjoying his Easter holidays. A doorbell camera even recorded him cheerily waving goodbye to his friend, 90 minutes before his mum walked into his bedroom and found him.

“He was a fun-loving, normal teenager who didn’t present any sign of mental health issues or anything that anybody was aware of,” Ellen Roome, Jools’ mum, says. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Roome suspects her child died as a result of the ‘blackout challenge’, which encourages users to choke themselves to unconsciousness and went viral online. However, the inquest into Jools’ death offered few answers. The coroner concluded they could not be “certain he was in a suicidal mood,” but stopped short of uncovering further details.

Desperate, Roome turned to social media platforms for answers. More than a year later, she still doesn’t know what happened.

Unfortunately Roome’s struggle to access the data is increasingly common. With each person having an average of 100 active accounts when they pass away, managing someone’s digital afterlife is becoming more and more complex. Pictures locked behind password or biometric-protected drives, subscriptions that seem impossible to cancel, and money locked in digital wallets – all of it adds an endless emotional and financial burden on grieving families.

The issue boils down to individual contracts, Jessica Flowerdew from law firm Brodies explains.

“Facebook is saying my contract is with me. And when I die that’s not transferrable. The contract was personal, so when you’re not around as far as a third-party provider is concerned, that’s it.”

I know the problem all too well. Both my parents died unexpectedly, each leaving behind their social media accounts, emails, and online subscriptions. Over the past month, cancelling my mum’s Netflix and other services has meant hour-long phone calls and numerous evenings with my aunt, piecing together potential passwords. And earlier this year, Facebook reminded me to send my dad a message on his birthday. It was a gut-punch notification – he’s been dead for over three years – but worse still was opening his page to find “happy birthday” messages from people who had no idea he was gone.

Hours of research on how to take down his profile led me to a Facebook group called Deceased People with Active Facebook Accounts. For more than a decade, members from all over the world have been turning to the chat, desperate for answers, sharing their frustration with a process they call “mission impossible”.

Two US-based users shared their struggle with me. Melody G Hussey, who’s trying to deactivate her deceased mum’s account, describes the administration as “very inconsiderate.” She adds: “We must send obituaries and additional things to them before they’ll even look into it.” Elaine Corbiere told me that despite numerous attempts to try and manage her mum’s account, who died more than two years ago, no one from the platform has got back to her. “There not a direct line to anybody in Facebook,” she says.

Untangling a loved one’s digital life is hard enough – and it’s made worse by every platform playing by its own rules. To expose the chaos, Step, a global body specialising in family inheritance, has created a digital assets scorecard which rates platforms out of eight based on how difficult it is to access a user’s account after their death.

Facebook performs best, scoring six points thanks to its “legacy contact” feature which lets someone memorialise or deactivate an account. Instagram, despite also being owned by the same company, Meta, earns just two points for its lack of clear guidance, while X and Amazon score a single point for offering “limited provision”.

For Roome, Snapchat proved one of the most difficult platforms to deal with, refusing to speak to her unless she contacted them through Jools’ own device. “I’ve never used Snapchat. I was thinking, ‘I don’t even know where I’m pressing.’ It’s not easy to work out how to request the data,’” she says.

When she finally managed to log in, she found there was another account linked to her son’s details. “They [Snapchat] said, ‘You’ll have to go back into the phone, log into the other account, and then we’ll respond.’ I complained because I hadn’t had a response, and they said they’d only reply to the account holder’s email. I said, ‘That’s my son’s email address. I don’t actually have it, funnily enough – he’s dead.’”

In April 2024, Roome also had a call with TikTok, during which she says staff admitted they weren’t sure whether Jools’ data had been deleted or what the company’s policy was. She hasn’t heard back since. “I said, ‘You’re a big enough company – you’ll have policies and procedures. You should know this. What is it?’ And nobody’s ever confirmed that [whether Jools’ data had been deleted] to me,” she says.

Holyrood contacted Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat for comment but received no response.
Beyond social media, failing to plan for your digital assets can carry serious financial consequences, especially as cryptocurrencies become more mainstream. As of 2024, around 12 per cent of UK adults own crypto, according to the Financial Conduct Authority. But if users don’t pass on instructions on how to unlock their digital wallets, those funds are gone for good. Globally, an estimated £23m worth of crypto is lost every day because heirs can’t access it. Yet in the UK, just seven per cent of people mention digital assets in their wills.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, legislation is “behind when it comes to digital assets,” Flowerdew says. At present, UK GDPR rules – designed to regulate how personal data is protected and processed – do not cover deceased people.

And Trish Knight, who works for Scotland-based data protection firm Really Good Data Protection, argues platforms’ seemingly indefinite retention of information exposes deep regulatory failures. “People [in companies] like Meta holding that data forever sounds a bit unlawful to me as well. If there’s been no activity on an account for a certain amount of time, whatever time that ought to be defined as, there should be a natural drop off.”

The UK has pledged to become the safest place to be online following the passage of the Online Safety Act, but Roome’s experience shows how far there is still to go. Following her son’s death, she sold her company to focus on campaigning for Jools’ Law, which would give bereaved parents the legal right to access and preserve their child’s social media data.

The bill was debated in January and won cross-party support. Roome’s MP, Max Wilkinson, called for urgent changes: “In years gone by, accessing a child’s belongings would have required searching through a child’s bedroom… Now it necessitates access to social media accounts, but the law has not kept pace. This is a cruel and inhumane process to impose on a grieving parent seeking nothing more than answers.”

The recent Data Use and Access Bill marked a step forward, with a clause allowing bereaved parents to request their child’s social media and online data from the year before their death – without the need to go through the courts. Under the new law, Ofcom, when notified by a coroner, also has the duty to issue a data preservation notice to social media companies to support investigations into death.

But the changes are not retrospective, offering little comfort to families already fighting for answers. Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, says: “Molly’s inquest showed the difficulty in accessing data and took five years to complete because of the lack of transparency from tech companies.” The foundation was set up in memory of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful content online. 

Like Roome, Burrows argues the new law does not go far enough, calling for a duty of candour on tech companies “to proactively share information about harm to coroners and regulators rather than having to rely on being asked the right questions”.

Flowerdew insists there is no “perfect solution” to the widespread problem. One of the biggest hurdles, she adds, is the borderless nature of digital life. “The digital assets of someone who has died are really challenging because you’re at the mercy of third-party providers – and they’re often not in the UK. They’re usually in the US, subject to different laws and policies. That’s one of the biggest problems: trying to negotiate all that.”

Roome also knows this well. She is one of four parents now navigating this international legal maze. The group has filed a lawsuit against TikTok for wrongful death, claiming their children passed away after taking part in the blackout challenge. 

The complaint was filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware by the US-based Social Media Victims Law Center on behalf of the families and claims that the social media platform broke the rules after promoting dangerous content that could cause significant physical harm.

And in the age where data can live forever, active accounts have also become a prime target for hackers. Cybercriminals are hacking into accounts to send friend requests from beyond the grave and clone identities to claim benefits. 

“The explosion of data that we’ve got absolutely everywhere [combined with] not being able to secure that or even get a handle on where it all is, is shocking,” Knight says.

She adds: “So there’s a personal responsibility on the individuals, but there’s also responsibilities on their relatives, when somebody dies to say: ‘Right, OK, if it’s still an open account, let’s recover it and then let’s put through the evidence to close the account down to protect people, to protect themselves as well’. It’s far too open.”

The environmental cost of this digital crisis is also growing. Every forgotten email and dormant profile contributes to carbon emissions, with 100GB of cloud storage producing around 0.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Multiply that by billions of inactive accounts over the coming years, and our digital afterlives become a hidden environmental burden. Campaigners are now calling for a culture of “digital decluttering,” where closing unused accounts is seen as an act of climate responsibility.

Going forward, education is the only quick and lasting solution, Flowerdew argues. “The law isn’t perfect and it’s going to struggle to keep pace,” she says. “But if we understand what we’ve got and we understand our options, we’ll be much better equipped.”

Knight agrees: “All this stuff is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as the people with these assets begin to die. We need to have these conversations earlier than we’re doing and not wait until it’s too late to try and deal with it.”

For now, Roome continues her fight on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier this year, she confirmed she had begun her “High Court journey” to secure a fresh inquest into her son’s death – a move that would allow her to use the new Data Act to access Jools’ social media data. In a post on LinkedIn, she is clear: “I won’t stop until someone eventually tells me there is nowhere else to look for answers. It shouldn’t be this hard.”