When I started writing about VPNs a few years ago, I was talking about how they can help you watch region-exclusive YouTube videos and stuff like that. I never thought that the subject would, in any way, ever end up encompassing the subject of human mortality and what exactly happens after we die.
While I can’t tell you what happens on a metaphysical level, I can tell you something that might well happen in the physical world of day-to-day life – or at least, the digital world of the internet. Information has recently come to light about Meta’s Project Lazarus, which would allow you to remain active on Facebook (and, presumably, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads) long after you’ve left this mortal coil.
Unlike the Lazarus of the Bible, who Jesus brings back to life (allegedly), Meta’s Lazarus is something much more unsettling. Rather than resurrecting you with the power of social media algorithms, it just creates an AI replacement. The idea is that this will supposedly help people through the grieving process, but I’m pretty sure my grief would be prolonged if I had to watch an AI pretending to live the life that the person would have had if they were still alive.
What we know at the moment is that it would draw from people’s chat histories and their behavior on Meta’s platforms to create an imitation of their personality. However, I think it’s pretty likely that Meta would use data acquired on individuals through other digital platforms to ensure that these posthumous duplicates are as accurate as possible.
The very concept is kind of chilling, but it gets even more disturbing when you start to think about the kind of situations that could arise if this is implemented. For instance, let’s imagine that you’re estranged from an abusive parent and you intentionally don’t allow them to have any insight into how you’re living your life. After you die, they could reconcile with your AI duplicate and suddenly have access to all the information about the life you lived outside of their shadow – information that you may never have wanted to share.
That’s not even the most disturbing exploitation of this feature I could imagine. Let’s say a young woman gets together with a creepy and controlling older man who ends up murdering her in a fit of jealous rage after a few months. He never knew her that well in life, and Project Lazarus just knows that the two were a couple, so the duplicate continues to act very lovingly towards the murderer, and he gets to learn all about her past experiences and thoughts. He then uses her as his AI girlfriend, a perfect version of her that will never trigger his jealous or violent tendencies, because he can keep her safely in his pocket.
These might sound like edge cases, but WhatsApp, for example, has over 3 billion monthly users. With so many people caught in Meta’s web, you just know that there will be thousands, or indeed, tens or even hundreds of thousands of instances where people are exploited beyond the grave because Lazarus has given them some form of continued existence. While there would probably be an opt-out option, I suspect people would be opted in by default, and many would end up being Lazarused without even realising it would happen.
Although a VPN can’t exactly stop Meta from doing this if you’ve already been using its platforms for years, it could help stop the bleeding, so to speak. As I said, there’s no doubt in my mind that Meta would draw data from other sources too (e.g. search history), and this is where the VPN can come in. It’s nearly impossible to exist in the digital world without leaving some kind of footprint, but a VPN will help make that footprint as small as possible. With a VPN on, your search history is just attributed to your VPN’s IP address (rather than yours), and if you don’t log into websites while it’s on, there’ll be no record.
The fact is that these megacorporations know all of our secrets. I’m not saying that there is any individual who has access to specific information about you or your online habits, but the profiles that have been drawn up about you for the purposes of ad-targeting and content algorithms are so detailed, and Project Lazarus would essentially be the first time that people you know would have access to the intricate portrait of you that these businesses work from. Apparently, there are no plans to move forward with it at this time, but Meta patented the idea in December, suggesting some level of interest.
There seems to be no limit to the disturbing uses being found for our data, so I recommend getting one of the best VPN services as soon as possible. NordVPN, Proton VPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, or ExpressVPN are all great choices (Nord is our favorite) and can help to severely limit the personal data that is being extracted from you.