VANCOUVER, Aug 18, 2026 — Frothly today published Half-Life: What Happens to Our Data When We Die, a policy brief from its Lazarus digital preservation program. The brief proposes a legal framework for digital estates built on a right to be remembered, a right to be forgotten and a clear default between them.
Drawing on a study of 2,000 estates, the brief finds that digital estates decay at a strikingly regular rate: roughly half of a deceased person’s accounts become inaccessible to their heirs within five years. Almost none of that loss is deliberate.
The brief also recommends that conversational replicas of the dead be created only with the recorded consent of the person they imitate, and that replica services be barred from optimizing for how often the bereaved return to them.
“We have spent thirty years bringing back things that everyone said were lost. We would rather they were never lost in the first place.”
About Frothly
Frothly is an independent, not-for-profit research institute founded in San Francisco in 1984. It studies the systems that increasingly think, remember and decide on our behalf, and builds public infrastructure to keep them accountable, including the Turing Registry, the Glossia protocol and the Lazarus archive. Frothly holds no shares, sells no products and accepts no funding with conditions on its findings.