so what *does* happen to your digital assets after you die? | john romano

Posted on 21 December 2010 by John Romano


This is a simple question and we wish there was a simple answer. Unfortunately there isn’t a standard way that Internet users can expect service providers to handle their accounts after death. Every provider has a “terms of service” (the legalese) that governs your account. Unfortunately for consumers, no two are alike.

Here’s a quick run down of some popular providers and what happens at each:
Facebook
Gmail
Twitter
Yahoo
YouTube

Facebook

Facebook covers the rights of deceased users in its privacy policy.

Your heirs can request that your account be deleted or “memorialized.” Memorialized profiles restrict profile access to confirmed friends, and allow friends and family to write on the user’s Wall in remembrance. You shouldn’t count on it staying active since anyone can request that it be memorialized by simply notifying Facebook and showing a death certificate or a news article that indicates your death.

Facebook has also introduced a new feature that allows you to “Download Your Information” This tool lets you download a copy of your photos, videos, wall posts, messages, friends list and other content. The file that you download can be opened in your browser so you can navigate through your content.

Gmail

Gmail provides instructions for gaining access to deceased user’s account in its help documents. They outline the steps to gaining access, which include a death certificate, and email you have received from the account in question and proof that you have legal authority over the estate.

Twitter

Twitter addresses this issue in its help documents:


If we are notified that a Twitter user has passed away, we can remove their account or assist family members in saving a backup of their public Tweets.
Please contact us with the following information:
Your full name, contact information (including email address), and your relationship to the deceased user.
The username of the Twitter account, or a link to the profile page of the Twitter account.
A link to a public obituary or news article.

Twitter is unique in that they offer survivors an archive of the user’s public Tweets. That’s actually very helpful as it’s often difficult to archive a Twitter account yourself.

Yahoo

Yahoo (which owns services like Flickr and Delicious) includes the following paragraph in its terms:


No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted.

Yahoo takes a harsh stance on death, but the good news is that they will not take this action without the receipt of a death certificate. It’s possible for you to ask your digital executor to archive your Yahoo account contents before presenting Yahoo with a death certificate.

YouTube

YouTube also lists their policy for deceased users in its help documents.


If an individual has passed away and you need access to the content of his or her YouTube account, please fax or mail us the following information:
Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
The YouTube account name of the individual who passed away.
A copy of the death certificate of the deceased.
A copy of the document that gives you Power of Attorney over the YouTube account.
If you are the parent of the individual, please send us a copy of the Birth Certificate if the YouTube account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, Power of Attorney is not required.

digital avatars: what the? | john romano

Posted on 29 May 2011 by John Romano

What if you had someone there for you, every single day, without fail – if they were always ready with a kind word or a response to your latest musing. Never mad. Always caring and concerned. Always ready to take time to be with you.

Would it matter if he or she were a robot? Or no longer alive?

Enter digital avatars. Two companies, Virtual Eternity and Lifenaut have released “digital avatar” products. What is a digital avatar? Check out the websites!

Potential

What’s most interesting is not how this avatar looks and works today. It’s the potential that these avatars have for the future and what they are the beginning of. As you can see if you play with it, this avatar is pretty basic. It’s predictive ability is restricted to the very limited amount of information that I put in its database of my attitudes, feelings, and perspectives – my digital “mind file.”

This is because right now programming these avatars takes a lot of time and energy. But what if it took no energy? What if they tapped into your social media accounts and passively listened to every status update, comment, or post? Imagine how rich a profile it would have in just a few years.

In 2032

Fast forward a couple decades. The AI is 100 times better (Moore’s Law and all that). You can have a natural conversation. Your mind file has 20 years worth of data on your thoughts and beliefs. What was a manipulated still photo is a fully, three-dimensional representation of you. It’s crossed theuncanny valley and is completely convincing.

Now, imagine that you die, and this projection of you “lives” on.

To me, the most compelling questions this technology raises are:

• How would this technology change the way the living experience the death of a loved one?
• How can this technology be used to extended consciousness?
• Is it OK that this is the first step down to a road toward synthetic life forms?
• Is the idea of consciousness transfer to a digital medium and ultimately a new body something we want?

Is this the future of death?

digital immortality and death 2.0 | scott lachut

To further complicate matters, while the space continues to evolve at an accelerated rate, the legal system struggles to keep pace, leading to a current situation where notions of who exactly owns these digital assets – individuals or sites – remains unclear. Though you may have spent the last 20 years building your character’s dominance in the dungeons and on the battlefields of World of Warcraft, if you never pass along your login information to anyone who can carry on your legacy, what then?

In cases where credit card information is exchanged with a site, there is at least some proof of ownership, but this is still no guarantee. And given that much of the web’s foundation is based on loose affiliations and social transactions that are more often than not, anonymous, determining who really sent out thousands of emails from a Hotmail account is difficult at best.

As Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University notes in a recent interview, lacking any concrete laws to follow, these matters fall to the discretionary policies (the terms and conditions that we scan across as we search for the “I Agree” check box) of the individual sites. Assuming that who owns this virtual flotsam and jetsam once you’re gone is something that concerns you or your loved ones, then this an eventuality that needs to be planned for.

Which leads us into the emerging commercial marketplace of Death 2.0, populated by companies hawking services to ensure your transition into the after life (both real and virtual) is as seamless as possible. Preparing people for the inevitability of their own demise is never any easy sell at any stage of the life, but given the relative youth of the audience that these sites are catering to, their prospects for return on investment are far down the road to say the least. And though these businesses might want to keep their own longevity in mind, their “future-forward” models point to a trend that can’t be ignored.

So while you’re still walking the hallowed hallways of the web, albeit non-corporeally, you can start planning for your after life. At Do Your Own Will, a site that allows you to create and print a simple, legally-binding contract online, you can take care of matters relating to your physical estate. As for sorting out the more complex questions surrounding your digital possessions, like determining who is going to inherit the social cache (and minutiae) of your Twitter account or run your thriving eBay store that trades in antique Pez Dispensers, turn to Dead Man Switch or Legacy Locker.

And if you always wanted a New Orleans-style funeral complete with a second line, then make it happen at My Wonderful Life because as the site advertises, “you only get one chance to make a last impression.” But why stop with your final day? Make your voice heard from beyond the grave without the need for seances or ouija boards. The Last Emailand Last Message Club offer a way for you to send emails to those you leave behind, from sentimental notes like birthday wishes and endorsements of love to secret messages like who did it and where the formula is buried.

Coping with the idea of death (either our own or someone else’s) is never an easy thing, and now with the evolution of the internet, we’re presented with an entirely new set of “things we can’t take with us”. It may be more complicated, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Though admittedly, it’s a rather strange concept to wrap our heads around, considering that the digital environment already seems to exist halfway between the physical world and “the great unknown”.

Still, we always seem to adapt (and make up stories for the things we can’t explain). Needless to say, the continued shift in our perspective and customs to encompass the virtual worlds in which we increasingly live, work and play will be an interesting one to witness.

via PSFK: http://www.psfk.com/2009/08/digital-immortality-and-death-20.html#ixzz1bEdoXzUZ

the future of death | digiurn

Recent design school graduate Jake Shapiro of New York shared has created: “The Future of Death” examining how our internet and social media oriented lives have and will continue to change the way we think about and deal with death and grief.

cyberspace when you're dead | ron walker

Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the fate of the worldly goods you leave behind: financial assets, personal effects, belongings likely to have sentimental value to others and artifacts of your life like photographs, journals, letters. Even if you haven’t made such arrangements, all of this will get sorted one way or another, maybe in line with what you would have wanted, and maybe not.

But many of us, in these worst of circumstances, would also leave behind things that exist outside of those familiar categories. Suppose you blogged or tweeted about this article, or dashed off a Facebook status update, or uploaded a few snapshots from your iPhone to Flickr, and then logged off this mortal coil. It’s now taken for granted that the things we do online are reflections of who we are or announcements of who we wish to be. So what happens to this version of you that you’ve built with bits? Who will have access to which parts of it, and for how long?

Not many people have given serious thought to these questions. Maybe that’s partly because what we do online still feels somehow novel and ephemeral, although it really shouldn’t anymore. Or maybe it’s because pondering mortality is simply a downer. By and large, the major companies that enable our Web-articulated selves have vague policies about the fate of our digital afterlives, or no policies at all. Estate law has only begun to consider the topic. Leading thinkers on technology and culture are understandably far more focused on exciting potential futures, not on the most grim of inevitabilities.

Nevertheless: people die. For most of us, the fate of tweets and status updates and the like may seem trivial (who cares — I’ll be dead!). But increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTubevideos uploaded every day; oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members; two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders.

At some point, these hoards will intersect with the banal inevitability of human mortality. One estimate pegs the number of U.S. Facebook users who die annually at something like 375,000. Academics have begun to explore the subject (how does this change the way we remember and grieve?), social-media consultants have begun to talk about it (what are the legal implications?) and entrepreneurs are trying to build whole new businesses around digital-afterlife management (is there a profit opportunity here?). Evan Carroll and John Romano, interaction-design experts in Raleigh, N.C., who run a site calledTheDigitalBeyond.com, have just published a tips-and-planning book, “Your Digital Afterlife,” with advice about such matters as appointing a “digital executor.”

Adele McAlear, a social-media and marketing consultant, became interested in this subject a few years ago, when one of her regular Twitter contacts died. A Web enthusiast who has created “Lord knows how many profiles” for herself in the course of road-testing various new services, she is an “advocate of creating content and putting it online.” And yet, she continues, it “hadn’t dawned on me, what happens to all of this stuff that you put out there, this digital litter that sort of accumulates.” That may be particularly true for people like McAlear, who have thoroughly integrated their Web expressions into their identity. (Indeed, she explores her new interest on a blog, DeathandDigitalLegacy.com.) But you don’t have to be a social-media consultant to live that way. More and more people do, as a matter of course. Millions of us are “sharing” our thoughts and tastes; our opinions and observations about WikiLeaks and “Glee” and the Tea Party and some weird dude on the subway this morning; and photographs of newborns and weddings and parties and — why not? — that weird dude on the subway. Maybe the momentous and the momentarily amusing add up to a pleasing means of real-time connection, but what do they add up to when we’re gone? The legacy of a life you hope your survivors will remember? Or a jumble of “digital litter” for them to sort through?

Digital Assets

A grandmother on her death bed tells her grandson. "I am leaving you with a farm. It has six tractors, 100 head of cattle, 60 sheep and $8,392,982 in cash. Her grandson replies "Grandma, I never knew you had a farm, why haven't you told me about this earlier?" "I didn't want you to worry about taking care of it until I was gone." She replied with a smile. "Where is the farm." Begged the grandson eagerly. "On Farmville dear."

where to from here?

Three generations have now been using computers most of their lives. We have been busy collecting digital photos, music and movies. Recently, we have begun uploading our digital assets to the Web and sharing them with each other.

We have also been busy expressing and describing our thoughts using blogs and online profiles. As of late we have begun connecting these profiles to one another, creating a complex landscape of online social networks. When we look at how fast things are changing we see that much of this innovation has happened in just the last 5 years. 

Now imagine leading a quality digital life for 50 more years. What will happen when you die? What will become of your online accounts? Your data? What do people pass on to their heirs? Can your survivors box up your digital life and archive it? Or will the data be lost without people to tend it? 

Or will the data live on forever? Can our digital self image achieve immortality? 

A whole industry will be born to answer these questions and satisfy a desire that has existed since the beginning of time - the desire for immortality. We all can't have a terra cotta army in our tomb, or a great pyramid above us. But for a fist full of dollars we will be able to maintain our digital footprint for all time. Just you wait and see.

庄子 － the wheelwright

Chuang Tzu - Duke Hwan and the Wheelwright



Duke Hwan of Khi, first in his dynasty,
sat under his canopy reading his philosophy.
And Phien the wheelwright was out in the yard
making a wheel.

Phien laid aside hammer and chisel,
climbed the steps
and said to duke Hwan,
“May I ask you, Lord,
what is this you are reading?”

Said the duke: “The experts, the authorities.”
Phien asked: “Alive or dead?”
The duke said: “Dead, a long time.”
“Then,” said the wheelwright,
“you are only reading the dirt they left behind.”

The duke replied, “What do you know about it?
You are only a wheelwright.
You had better give me a good explanation
or else you must die.”

The wheelwright said,
“Let us look at the affair from my point of view.
When I make wheels, if i go easy they fall apart,
and if I am too rough they don’t fit.
But if I am neither too easy nor too violent
they come out right,
and the work is what I want it to be.

“You cannot put this in words,
you just have to know how it is.
I cannot even tell my own son exactly how it is done,
and my own son cannot learn it from me.
Se here I am, seventy years old, still making wheels!

The men of old took all they really knew
with them to the grave.
And so, Lord, what you are reading there
is only the dirt they left behind them.”

digital donation

...please don't take your memories to heaven...
...we need them here on earth...

If organs can give life, surely memories can give knowledge? Is this not as important?