Digital Legacy Planning for Older Adults

Dr. Elizabeth Stobert’s research focuses on usable security: the study of how human factors shape the design and effectiveness of security and privacy systems. The work examines how insights from psychology and the social sciences can improve the design of tools meant for everyday, non-expert users. Her work is especially concerned with people using technology at home, including families, older adults, young people, and others whose security and privacy needs are shaped by their daily lives. 

One major area of Dr. Stobert’s recent work examines digital legacy: what happens to a person’s digital information, accounts, and artifacts after death. Her research explores how digital materials such as photos, emails, social media content, online recipe collections, and digitized family archives compare to physical possessions like photo albums, letters, and keepsakes. Through focus groups, participatory design activities, and interviews, she found that many people have given little thought to their digital legacy, often because the topic feels morbid, overwhelming, or easy to ignore because digital artifacts are not physically visible.

Dr. Stobert’s findings point to a need for better ways to help people recognize, manage, preserve, and share meaningful digital artifacts. While access to accounts is an important part of the issue, her work emphasizes that access alone is not enough: loved ones also need context, guidance, and a sense of which digital materials matter. Her research encourages people to think about what digital traces might be meaningful to others, how they want to be remembered, and how design could support more thoughtful planning for the personal, human side of digital life.