La Vanguardia has become the first newspaper to implement the Reader’s Digital Testament, a pioneering document in the international press that aims to facilitate the erasure of readers’ fingerprints in the event that they have opened a participation profile, with their photo and biographical data, on the newspaper’s website and who do not wish to keep it after their death.
In this form, which can be downloaded, readers who wish to do so express their willingness to take advantage of La Vanguardia’s Digital Reader’s Testament to inform and request the deletion of their profile in the newspaper’s Readers’ Network upon their death. To do this, in this document they authorize a relative to send, upon his death, the Literal Death Certificate to La Vanguardia, through the email participacion@lavanguardia.es, so that the newspaper is aware of the death and can delete the reader profile.
The measure is in line with promoting a Network of Readers of La Vanguardia that is a digital environment of quality, safe, informative, current affairs reviewer and open to the inspiration and creativity of readers, in which readers can share their content and have their own participation profile with all the guarantees, even after their death. The Digital Reader’s Testament does not have legal validity, but it is a means to communicate to the newspaper the will of the readers upon their death.
In general terms, a “digital will” is understood as an “expression of will or document that includes the destiny that, once a person dies, he wishes to be given to his digital presence (on social networks, email servers, systems electronic payment…)”. By definition, a will is “the testimony of the will that a person disposes for after his death.”
In Spain as a whole, the digital will was regulated by the Organic Law on Protection of Personal Data and Guarantee of Digital Rights (LOPD-GDD), of December 5, 2018.
Previously, in Catalonia, the Parliament approved Law 10/2017, of June 27, on digital wills and modification of the second and fourth books of the Civil Code of Catalonia.
In order to have legal validity, a digital will must be formalized before a notary, like wills in the strict sense. In a ruling, Judge Encarna Roca TrÃas, a member of the Constitutional Court, specified that, although this type of document is called a “digital will”, strictly speaking they are not wills.
Taking all this into account, the implementation of the Digital Testament of the Reader of La Vanguardia is more closely linked to the tradition of the figure of the Pressombudsmannen or Reader’s Ombudsman and stands as a tool to collect the will of readers regarding this specific section of their digital activity on the newspaper’s website, specifically, their participation profile.
Therefore, this document created by La Vanguardia responds to the social responsibility of the newspaper, in the sense defined by the Hutchins Report in 1947 when there was still no talk of social networks or digital journalism.
In 1942, the person in charge of Time magazine, Henry Luce, requested the collaboration of the rector of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, to carry out a study on the state of journalism, together with experts in the Social Sciences, which he ended up titled : A Free and Responsible Press (1947).
This Hutchins Report gave rise to the Theory of Social Responsibility of the Press, which ended up deriving into the concept of Social Responsibility of the Media. But, at that time, there was no digital press. Neither are social networks.
As regards the erasure of the digital footprint, there have been initiatives such as Google’s Inactive Account Manager. Another example is the case of Facebook, which although its policy, once death occurs, is to “convert the account into a memorial”, it also allows it to be deleted by following certain requirements and steps.
La Vanguardia, with the Reader’s Digital Testament, adapts to the new times and goes a step further regarding the social responsibility of the media in the 21st century.
In the 1970s, under the auspices of Unesco, emphasis was placed on the rights and duties of the journalist, starting with the so-called MacBride Report (1980), prepared by the Irishman Sean McBride, winner of the Nobel Prize for the Paz, who, like Hutchins, surrounded himself with a number of experts in the world of communication to carry out his work, also known as Multiple Voices, One World.
But, well into the 21st century, with the context of social networks and digital journalism, the debate is no longer only about the rights and duties of the journalist, but also about the rights and duties of the reader (or the user of social networks). For this reason, La Vanguardia provided itself with a Guide and Rules for Participation of the Network of La Vanguardia readers. And that is why the Reader’s Digital Testament has also been implemented for the first time in the press.