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This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my cl
by Afforess 13y ago
This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.
- fourspace 13y agoAny suggestions on how to actually do this?
- Fuzzwah 13y agohttp://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-digital-afterlife-with.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-dig...
- Afforess 13y agoThere are several services of varying levels of service, but honestly it's not that hard to write up a small script to fire off an email to get you to turn off the switch for a month. After multiple failures it assumes you are dead and sends a payload email to a trusted friend. You can easily prepay up a good sum on most hosts, aws, digital ocean, etc. plenty of good low-cost mail apis too, like mailgun.
- StavrosK 13y agohttp://www.deadmansswitch.net/ http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is what I wrote years ago to do it. Make sure your messages don't scare people too much, in case you forget to check in/don't get the emails, though.
- jacquesm 13y agoOne thing that always kept me awake about this idea is the fear of false triggering.
- StavrosK 13y agoYeah, there is a small risk, although, in all the years, it's been two instances where emails stopped going out and some people forgot to log in in that duration (nothing has ever gone out before its time). You can customize your notification intervals to make them longer or more frequent, if you want. The risk isn't very big, though, especially if you remember to log in every first of the month, for example, just to make sure.
- surge 13y agoI've long thought of a start up that would offer a kill switch service. Something that you checked into every so often to verify you were still alive (by email, text, or it just monitored your social feeds). If over a custom set period of time 30-365 days, if it hadn't heard anything it would attempt to confirm you're still alive either by notifying you directly or a friend to confirm if you weren't. At which point it will notify services to suspend accounts, or send a list of passwords or account access information to those you trust to handle deactivating your facebook, twitter,or turning it into a memorial of sorts (since I guess your social feeds kind of become a digital memorial of your life). The killer feature even possibly delete sensitive data you don't want relatives seeing on your computer by installing some client app. :P I don't know I'm surprised a kill switch service like this doesn't exist.
- pizzeys 13y agoI wrote this for just me a while back, and everyone I talked to about it thought it was morbidly weird. I'm glad there are others who think it isn't, but that might be something a startup had to contend with.
- kaeruct 13y agoAny change you could publish it? I would love to have this myself
- surge 13y agoI don't know about this person's service, but someone else posted something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6471713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6471713
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- surge 13y agoWills and life insurance are morbidly weird, but like it or not people need them. People have "digital" estates now, that need to be managed just as much as one's physical affairs once they die.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThat's really not what I took away from this. Why do you... you know, care what happens to your online accounts? Web accounts are no more special than your library or toll road accounts. The only reason bank accounts matter at all is because the contest need to be disbursed.
- Loughla 13y agoDo you want your on-line account compromised with Viagra spam after your death? Do you want your grieving family to receive BIGGER PENIS NOW advertisements from you once you've passed?
- sliverstorm 13y agoHow exactly would my passing cause this?
- jlgreco 13y agoYour passing wouldn't cause it; and it could happen to anybody. However having it happen after you die is going to have an emotional impact on those who are still alive. How would it feel to open up facebook and see that you have a message from your deceased spouse? Not very good I imagine. I think it is entirely reasonable that some people would want to prevent this from happening.
- sliverstorm 13y agoWe can never completely escape the echos of the past.
- eropple 13y agoAnd your platitudes don't actually address the points raised.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
- officemonkey 13y agoThis is the on-line version of the "If I die, get rid of my porn stash so my mom won't find it."
- ToastyMallows 13y agoGoogle actually has a form of this, called Inactive Account Manager. You can pick an amount of time and who you want to control your information when you die (or go into a coma?). Pretty awesome, I set mine up already. https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive
- tsycho 13y agoYour link seems to have some hidden chars at the end, which is why it's not working (for me, atleast). Here's the link without the extra chars - https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive
- ToastyMallows 13y agoHmm very strange! All I did was copy/paste, oh well. Thanks for the working link, hope people take advantage of it.
- junto 13y agoThank you this. I didn't know about this feature. I'm glad my wife could now get access to all of my email, contacts and photos once I'm gone.
- laihiu 13y agoYou might want to check out Perpetu. It allows you to specify what happens to your online accounts (e.g. forward all your emails, write your final Facebook post, delete all tweets, etc): www.perpetu.co