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We are creating digital legacies for ourselves every day - even, increasingly, every minute. More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone. The information about ourselves that we record online is the sum of our relationships, interests and beliefs. It's who we are. Hans-Peter Brondmo, head of social software and services at Nokia in San Francisco, calls this collection of data our "digital soul".

Sharing our lives on social networks is now commonplace, but what happens when we are gone? Channel 4 News finds people are thinking more carefully about their digital legacy.

Jacques Mechelany, formerly a high-flying French banker, has thought a lot about death and the human legacy. One reason is that he has travelled so manically in planes that he felt impelled to update his will regularly. But also, a few years ago he inherited some stunning photo albums. They contained photos of his ancestors dating back to 1870 - but Mechelany was frustrated by how hard it was to find any personal details about them.

Your photos, status updates and tweets will fascinate future historians. Will these online remains last forever? In this special report, newscientist.com editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury - for whom these are not idle questions - reports on life, loss, memory and forgetting in the internet age.

"The Digital Beyond maintains this list of online services that are designed to help you plan for your digital death and afterlife or memorialize loved ones. These services come in all flavors including digital estate services, posthumous email services and online memorials."

There are cur­rently few pro­ce­dures or pub­lic aware­ness about what hap­pens to on­line dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties after death. This paper dis­cusses what hap­pens with per­sonal elec­tronic in­for­ma­tion after death and looks to what is ar­gued to be the rapidly ap­proach­ing dig­i­tal Af­ter­life. This af­ter­life of new emer­gent be­hav­iour of­fers a chal­lenge of al­most unimag­in­able scope to the cre­ative vi­sion of Artists, Philoso­phers, Tech­nol­o­gists and Cul­tural thinkers.

Facebook profiles don't die the same way people do. If I Die is a Facebook app that makes sure, even if you die, your social self can still send out your last wishes and post messages to your friends years after you're gone. If I Die lets "you" post a final message to your wall and loved one when you're dead.

Fraudsters are increasingly targeting the estates of the deceased for valuable internet-hosted assets such as online bank accounts, private client lawyers have warned.