The woman’s plaint opens with a catalog of online and personal device reminders of her daughter’s death in February 2024:

MY CAR’S BLUETOOTH asks if I’d like to connect to “Miranda’s iPhone.”
Facebook pings me with “memories”: photo carousels of my adult daughter and me on a beach or posing for goofy selfies.
Miranda’s name appears on my list of “favorite” numbers on my phone. A shared streaming account offers recommendations that cater to Miranda’s high-low tastes: a historical drama, and the new season of “Real Housewives.”
Then there’s my Amazon account, which lists Miranda’s shipping address in Brooklyn.

Then she wrote

Every time her ghost pops up on a device, my heart is ripped anew.

And

OUR ONLINE PROFILES outlive our physical bodies. We can pack or give away possessions, but the tech gods preserve the digital lives forever of those we’ve lost.

However.

My sympathies for the woman’s loss of her daughter, but really, whose fault is it that all of that personal information was put into the Internet cloud in the first place? Whose fault is it that these data were not deleted from the cloud—or from the contact list she still has loaded into her car—some time after she laid her daughter to rest, but instead were left scattered about among the cloud and her devices these 14 months after her daughter’s death?

And: the despicable behavior of AT&T in the face of a court order and of Apple’s and Alphabet’s differing decisions to censor what information each would release in the face of a court order, notwithstanding, the decision to give up the court fight was this woman’s alone, even though she was making progress on the matter.

Again, my sympathies for the woman, but she doesn’t get to hide behind her grief to duck responsibility for her own decisions and actions.