Platforms Designed for the Living

It’s the start of another year, and it feels like the right time to write something again… It’s been long overdue. The break can be easily explained as “life’s been busy.” But not the fun, “I've too many hobbies” kind of busy. It’s been more the weighty type that rearranges priorities without asking. 

The last few months of 2025 were mostly about caring for my wife as she looked after her dying father - watching his health decline, and accepting where things were heading. That acceptance didn’t come in a single moment. It just happened, and became part of our routine.

There’s a strange contrast now, at the start of the new year. Everyone is talking about fresh starts, clean slates, new goals… while we’re still very much dealing with something unfinished. Grief doesn’t respect our calendar. It didn’t reset at midnight. It just carried on, quietly, into 2026.

But this post isn’t about wallowing or looking for sympathy. It’s more of a reflection… on what happens after someone dies, particularly in a world that assumes we're still very much alive, still scrolling, clicking, and paying. Caring for my father-in-law was one part of that journey. What came next was something I wasn’t quite prepared for.

There’s a moment after someone dies where responsibility quietly changes hands. Not ceremonially. I didn't give a speech or receive a checklist. I just realised that things which were never mine… now are.

Phones. Laptops. Email accounts. Drawers full of paperwork. Mail that keeps arriving through the door, addressed to someone who no longer exists. At some point, I stopped being a relative and became a custodian.

Naturally, my first job of the first week was to delete his browser history. Experience has shown me this is a required decency. Some things are better left undiscovered, and nobody needs their final legacy to be a poorly timed Google search…

With that small but duty done, the real work began. Unpicking a life that had become digital by default. Accounts logged in years ago and never touched again. Recovering passwords that were never shared. Devices that assumed the same user would be around forever.

It’s an odd feeling… sitting there with access to someone’s digital profile, knowing they never expected you to see it. There’s no guidance for this part. Just a growing list of things that need closing, cancelling, or explaining to systems that don’t really have a concept of “this person is gone”.

That’s when, for me, it stopped being about grief… and started being about infrastructure. 

The first real job was cleaning up his online presence. Not the sentimental stuff… the public-facing mess. The “I think I’ve been hacked” posts went first. No mate, you weren’t hacked. You just used the same password everywhere for years and trusted the internet far too much. A quick sweep, a few quiet deletions, and a general lockdown of anything still visible to the outside world.

That turned out to be timely.

The moment my wife tagged her Dad in a public post announcing his passing, the ghouls appeared. Fake memorial pages. Comment replies linking to phishing sites. Strangers circling immediately, looking to exploit grief under the guise of sympathy. It was grotesque… and depressingly efficient. 

That was the point where I moved fast to memorialise his accounts. LinkedIn were excellent. Genuinely - a simple process linking my request to an obituary, and they took care of the rest. Clear, human, respectful. Job done.

Facebook… who you'd expect to be professional… not so much.

They wanted proof of death. Official documented proof. Which sounds reasonable until you’re waiting for a coroner’s investigation to conclude because your father-in-law passed shortly after surgery. Standard procedure, apparently… but it meant paperwork took time. And until then, Mr Zuckerberg simply ignored every request in order to maintain his platform’s body count.

So I did what any sane person would do. I assumed my father-in-law’s identity. Logged in, locked it down, removed public visibility to protect what I could while we waited for bureaucracy to catch up with reality. It felt wrong signing in, especially as personal messages popped up in the notifications. Friends and family who wanted to say a personal goodbye. But sadly this was better than leaving the door wide open for stinking ghoulish opportunists.

While I was at it, I took great pleasure in deleting Instagram. A small mercy. One less nasty algorithm that is constantly pushing its narrative into the void.

After social media came the inbox, which I wasn’t really prepared for. At first, it’s mundane. Newsletters he may have once signed up for. Account alerts. Receipts from services that quietly renew themselves every month. You expect a bit of noise.

But then you realise something unsettling. None of it stops. Day after day, messages keep arriving as if he were still there. Still reading. Still engaging. 

Sales alerts. Donation requests. Political messaging. Religious outreach. All written in the present tense, all assuming a living, breathing person on the other end. Some of it is automated politeness. A lot of it is targeted urgency. Most of it felt wrong. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about watching systems continue to court a deceased person. Not malicious… just indifferent. Seeking attention. Seeking action. Seeking money. Long after the recipient is capable of reading any of it.

Charities were the hardest to read. Messages thanking him for past support, followed immediately by gentle nudges to give again. Appeals framed as personal conversations. “We miss you.” “We need you.” “Your support matters.” “Come on mate, it's Christmas.”

Nobody had checked whether he was still alive.

And that’s the thing. These systems don’t understand absence. They only understand silence. And silence, in a digital world, is just a failure to engage.

If left alone, this inbox would happily keep going for decades, even. A slow, relentless stream of requests and reminders, all patiently waiting for a response from someone who only exists in memory now. After a while, it started to feel less like automation and more like a haunting built entirely out of templates and cron jobs.

To be fair, not everyone got this wrong. BT were genuinely good. A dedicated bereavement team, clear language, and no awkward scripts. They understood the requirement, and things got closed. Refunds arrived in the form of a cheque addressed to his next of kin. No follow-ups. No friction. Exactly what you want when you’re already carrying enough.

Premier Radio too. A short, personal message back to us. A simple acknowledgement and thanks. It felt human… which, at this point, stood out from the rest. 

As above, LinkedIn handled things well too. Kept it simple and respectful.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum.

Facebook appears to actively want dead accounts. Otherwise I can’t explain why my kids’ grandma, three years deceased, still pops up with cheerful birthday reminders like nothing’s happened. She's now a digital zombie wandering the algorithm, resurfacing once a year to remind everyone how broken this system is.

Apple are in the shit house too! He still had active subscriptions for services that he hasn’t been able to access for a few years now. I want to sign in to his account, but verifying his email and phone number isn’t enough to unlock it. The best they could offer is a seven-day cooling-off period before they allow him to reset his password…

A couple of charities also need to reassess their approach. Repeated emails. No response to replies. Every unsubscribe journey is carefully engineered to make you feel guilty or confused enough to give up. In the end, I made full use of the Direct Debit Guarantee. That was both decisive and satisfying.

And then there are the companies still clinging to physical mail-outs. No way to deal with it except picking up the phone and surrendering twenty minutes of your life to an automated call system. It’s 2026, and somehow each flyer still demands a personal sacrifice of time and patience. Furniture Village… you are the worst. A special place in admin hell awaits you.

For these named companies, and all others operating in this area, this is a call to do better.

Death isn’t an edge case. Customers / Users / Clients die. Sometimes they’re 70 years old, and sometimes they’re barely 20. But if they do die, the systems left behind need to show a bit of humanity… or risk exposing just how transactional these relationships have become.

Fact: all of our customers will one day stop responding to us. Then their payments will eventually fail. And finally the accounts go dormant. This is inevitable. But what isn’t, is how difficult these companies can make the process for the people left behind. Bereavement shouldn’t require persistence.

When someone dies, “just good enough” doesn’t feel good enough anymore. The automation feels cold and the cheerful emails coming into a deceased person's inbox (or mailbox) feel careless. 

Facebook and others have spent millions in time and effort to easily onboard people to their platforms. Maybe it’s time they put the same thought into how they can leave them too.