The month after my grandmother died, I received several emails from her. Not from her, of course, but from an old AOL email account of hers that had been taken over by spammers. My mother and other family members called to ask me — the granddaughter who studies computer security — to make the emails stop. We were all strangely unsettled by these messages from beyond the grave, by my grandmother’s sudden appearance in our inboxes so soon after we’d lost her. More than just spam, this felt like a ghost in the machine.

Source: The Ghost in the Machine – NYTimes.com