8 ms·

What happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?

107 points by bootload 11y ago

batou 11y ago
I've solved this the easy way. The only "online service" I use is an IMAP box and run that using inbox zero. Everything important is archived on disk in eml files. We share all our passwords in a single keepaas database and everything we have data-wise is in a shared folder on a shared computer. Backups are all in known locations. We regularly empty our phones an cameras and transcode everything into neutral formats. The digital life is 22Gb of photos and videos spanning 13 years so far. So there isn't a digital life as such, just a pool of electronic memories and information which we share. I couldn't use anything deeper after watching a friend go through the painful process of losing everything tied to an ecosystem of a software vendor. Oh and I'll only use a system that respects my control for my data. Currently this is windows 8.1 but with the introduction of 10, it appears I'm not going to have to dump that due to the incoming app ecosystem and hit Linux. If this all looks like a lot of effort, you're only doing the work up front. Retrospectively if you don't do this, you're deferring a world of pain.
- danieldk 11y ago
  Indeed, I think that having a shared keychain is very important. I have heard of people planned to do such a thing, but never did before it was too late. Sorting out the digital life off- and online will be a mess without it. Do it today. We have also been moving stuff out of data silos and are moving back to plain old files where possible. E.g. administrative stuff we share using Bittorrent Sync (because it is peer to peer and encrypted) and we store photos in Dropbox (because they are easier to share with family that way). We considered doing everything with BTSync, but on iOS the interface is too difficult for non tech-savvy family.
  - batou 11y ago
    I tried to sync for several years and it never worked. I tried everything. Eventually we just moved to using one computer and sharing it. Its not healthy to spend all the time on it anyway. Having a pooled machine has a number of social benefits as well. So we have a single laptop, three smartphones (my oldest daughter has one as well) and they're all handed in weekly to me for data extraction and archival. The laptop is a Lenovo X201 so it can go anywhere and we have a docking station and full desktop setup if you need anything a little more healthy to use.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Did you consider something like a Synology NAS, which has free mobile apps for syncing?
      - batou 11y ago
        Yes. I had one. It died suddenly and left me with a £400 bill for a new one. Fortunately I backed up the NAS to an external disk but from this and other experiences, I've come to a general rule: the reliability of a backup system is inversely proportional to the number of moving parts Hence why I use beyond compare to manually sync files to two physical mediums from the master copy on my laptop. One encrypted USB stick I carry on me at all times and one hard disk that lives in a fire safe.
        oracuk 11y ago
        Moving hard disks back and forth to my fire safe is a pain. A hardened usb disk that is itself fire-rated. That I would buy.
        batou 11y ago
        You would need one with the mass of a fire safe which somewhat nullifies the point.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Some companies sell fire-safe & waterproof HD enclosures which you can use without moving the disks.
        JosephRedfern 11y ago
        How about a fire-safe with a female USB port on the outside, and a male USB port on the inside - both connected? That would be cool.
        TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
        It's hard to make anything small fire-rated, due to thermal inertia (or rather, the lack thereof). I'm surprised I haven't seen a NAS with the hard drive enclosure fire-rated.
- ytdht 11y ago
  wow, only 22gb in 13 years? Do you lower your media's resolutions before archiving them? I thought about doing that with most of mine... but I would still need to go through the collection one by one to avoid doing it on my favorite ones even if I used exif metadata to rate most of them.
  - batou 11y ago
    All photos are ~1.2Mb jpegs straight from a Nikon d3100 these days. I don't archive raws or process them other than perhaps rotation. Videos are h264 with a reasonable profile although this will change one day. The key to keeping it contained is to not keep everything. I'm not afraid to throw away stuff.
anon4 11y ago
The only digital life I'm worried about in the event of my untimely death is the few IRC channels I frequent. Just let those guys know I'm gone, put up a "He's dead, Jim, take what you want." on my GitHub and leave the rest to bit-rot. I don't think the cloud cares that I won't feed it data no more.
- batou 11y ago
  Write a dead man's switch script. You just have to remind it you're not dead once a month for example. However don't do what a colleague of mine did back in the early 00s. after a motorcycle accident he was in hospital for three weeks. This was back in the days before ubiquitous internet access (horrible times!). His dead mans switch went off after two weeks and caused an email to be sent to his boss to call him a vacuous cunt. Obviously that didn't go down well at all.
  - paublyrne 11y ago
    Better to set it for two months.
    - SapphireSun 11y ago
      Why not six or a year? It'll be very hard to screw that up and you can Hari Seldon your friends and relatives.
      - XorNot 11y ago
        Except if you forget when it fires. These sorts of things aren't done because doing them right is actually very very hard.
        kiiski 11y ago
        It could of course start sending a countdown to your email a month before going off.
      - 11y ago
DanBC 11y ago
Apple (in England) copper-bottoms laws, and require too much documentation. When a person dies their estate goes through probabte. You get official documents as a result. That documentarion is effectively a court order - they are good enough to get banks to release funds from the dead person's account to the executor of the will. Apple sometimes do not recognise those documents and refuse to unlock devices that used to belong to dead people, even if the device is mentioned in the dead person's will. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26448158 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26448158 Here they're not asking for access to the information - they just want the device to be unlocked. Apple recognised, after publication, that they'd made an error in this case, but they maintain that a court order is required for access to iCloud accounts. But they don't recognise grants of probate as valid court orders.
- vitovito 11y ago
  Apple's policies around deceased users' hardware and accounts has recently (early 2015) changed, so it's possible this particular problem wouldn't happen again. Dead users do appear to happen infrequently enough that not every CSR seems to know what to do when you call in about one, though. However, without court orders of some sort, you're probably completely out of luck. A death certificate used to be enough, but no longer. I found myself in that particular edge case (along with two Canadian families) earlier this year, as a relative had passed away in a state that did not mandate probate, and the family had elected to not go through the courts, and so had no legal documentation establishing an executor or estate. Apple ultimately said that they needed a court order to close the account or transfer the purchases to another one, otherwise the account and login would remain active forever, period.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Can purchases be transferred to someone in a will, or do they go to the executor of the estate? There has been talk of creating a legal trust to license digital purchases, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/22/digital_assets_and_death_who_owns_music_video_e_books_after_you_die.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/22/digital_a... & http://susanshare.com/kindle-books-and-itunes-apps-is-there-a-trust-for-that http://susanshare.com/kindle-books-and-itunes-apps-is-there-...
Udo 11y ago
"Facebook tends to “memorialise” their account – freeze them so they can be viewed, but providing no access to past messages. [...] Facebook also offended a fair number of bereaved people with its Year in Review clips [...] The problem was that for some, these were pictures of dead loved ones." Here is something I really don't understand. For some reason it's apparently preferred, both by Facebook as well as people overall, to rub out a deceased person's digital existence - as opposed to preserving a bit of their life and writing for posterity. To me, the "memorialization" of FB accounts looks like an almost cynical choice of words considering what it actually entails. Do we really prefer to pretend dead people never existed in the first place?
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  >Do we really prefer to pretend dead people never existed in the first place? I think that we consider facebook, a commercial entity based on data-mining every scrap of information it holds, an inappropriate place to memorialise our loved ones.
  - Udo 11y ago
    That's a separate question though. Fact of the matter is people do tend to put an enormous part of their lives on social media platforms. So it's on there right now, which is too late to consider if it was a good idea to trust an unreliable medium to steward your data to begin with. What I'm concerned about is that when a friend or family member dies, you have to cope with the loss of the person, but on top of that Facebook forcibly arranges for you the loss of all corresponding data as well. They're effectively saying "Well, this guy's dead now, so we're taking away the documentation of all shared memories with that person. We're honoring the deceased by erasing their digital existence as best as we can."
    - grkvlt 11y ago
      > we're taking away the documentation of all shared memories with that person They aren't taking anything away. See my earlier comment about what memorialization actually entails. Nothing is erased, the content is preserved for family and friends. Of course the account status is changed, it would be inappropriate for a dead person's account to show up in lists of contacts to invite to events, and so on.
marincounty 11y ago
I didn't read the article, but I get the drift. I knew a guy was in a very unhappy marriage. He didn't have a large online presence, but his posts and pictures were important to him. You couldn't tell he was in a unhappy marriage--unless you knew him. His wife was not in any of his pictures, nor did he talk about her. Well he died in his sleep one night. The next day, all his accounts were taken down. I don't know who removed all his accounts, but they were gone. My point is unless you have an agreement, or the surviving spouse is slandered in some way; I think, in most cases, if the surviving spouse should just use the passwords to convey the obituary notice. (I think I was bothered with just how quick his accounts vanished? All his accounts were on free sites. I didn't see any need to close them all down. Plus, after all the verbal abuse, and drama--his only enjoyment, or escapism was going online?)
evantahler 11y ago
A shared and synced 1password vault between family members is the best option I've seen so far. You can have your vault, a work vault, a family fault, etc which is kept in sync with separate permissions.
Theodores 11y ago
Relatively speaking those parents of mine are to pop their clogs one day (well, Burkenstock sandals, one day being many years hence). I would not be happy about deleting everything on their PC's, I would want stuff kept. However... With my own 'digital life' I would prefer people to just fdisk/powerwash my PC-style devices and send the things to the charity shop. There really would be nothing to see on any of my machines, the cloud can just be forgotten, nothing really matters. I don't know if others would see it that way though. My point being that 'what you would do' concerning your oh-so-precious online life is different to what you might think when it comes to someone else's digital life.
bryang 11y ago
Skype is one of my most hated programs. And a reason for that is the utter absurdity in regards to account deletion. You have to do fairly standard things like identify email, password and some contacts.... but you also have to know the EXACT month and year of which you signed up. And unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email up there is no possible way to find out. When I first signed up, I had a ridiculous name like everyone else did back in the day, and I wanted to just move on. Not very serious, I know, but this issue can be for many circumstances. I really wish that some legislation would be passed for a "Nuke" button standard on all digital platforms that allows you or a designed individual to erase profiles at will.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > And unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email there is no possible way to find out. What, do people really delete read email?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Before GMail a typical webmail provider gave you so little space that deleting irrelevant e-mails was standard practice; otherwise your inbox would soon fill up. Frankly, I had to delete my e-mails on school Linux server AND not so long ago, on company mailbox. Yes, this is ridiculous and yes, it happens.
  - fao_ 11y ago
    I use a 503(c) service for email, the only thing is that they rely on dontations, so the more space I use the more it'll cost them. So out of being curteous to them, I delete any unwanted email. One other reason I delete email is because I like having a 'clean' inbox. But despite all of that, it's really Skype's fault for assuming that a user will keep randomly chosen, arbitrary data like that. Not all of us have photographic memories, so the vast userbase, as a result, will have great difficulty in deleting their account. There's also a very high probability that it's done by Skype deliberately, to stop people deleting their accounts (Because data mining is 'phun'!)
stretchwithme 11y ago
Hopefully, our loved ones' digital lives will hang around forever. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, after all. My half brother, who we just found in 2005, started a Facebook account before he died. He added me and never got around to adding anybody else. I can post things on his wall, but no one sees them. Both my parents have passed away and pass by them in my contacts. I won't deleting them, ever. I did update my Dad's location, though, just so I can always use that for directions to their grave.

107 points by bootload 11y ago

batou 11y ago

I've solved this the easy way. The only "online service" I use is an IMAP box and run that using inbox zero. Everything important is archived on disk in eml files. We share all our passwords in a single keepaas database and everything we have data-wise is in a shared folder on a shared computer. Backups are all in known locations. We regularly empty our phones an cameras and transcode everything into neutral formats. The digital life is 22Gb of photos and videos spanning 13 years so far. So there isn't a digital life as such, just a pool of electronic memories and information which we share. I couldn't use anything deeper after watching a friend go through the painful process of losing everything tied to an ecosystem of a software vendor. Oh and I'll only use a system that respects my control for my data. Currently this is windows 8.1 but with the introduction of 10, it appears I'm not going to have to dump that due to the incoming app ecosystem and hit Linux. If this all looks like a lot of effort, you're only doing the work up front. Retrospectively if you don't do this, you're deferring a world of pain.

danieldk 11y ago
Indeed, I think that having a shared keychain is very important. I have heard of people planned to do such a thing, but never did before it was too late. Sorting out the digital life off- and online will be a mess without it. Do it today. We have also been moving stuff out of data silos and are moving back to plain old files where possible. E.g. administrative stuff we share using Bittorrent Sync (because it is peer to peer and encrypted) and we store photos in Dropbox (because they are easier to share with family that way). We considered doing everything with BTSync, but on iOS the interface is too difficult for non tech-savvy family.
- batou 11y ago
  I tried to sync for several years and it never worked. I tried everything. Eventually we just moved to using one computer and sharing it. Its not healthy to spend all the time on it anyway. Having a pooled machine has a number of social benefits as well. So we have a single laptop, three smartphones (my oldest daughter has one as well) and they're all handed in weekly to me for data extraction and archival. The laptop is a Lenovo X201 so it can go anywhere and we have a docking station and full desktop setup if you need anything a little more healthy to use.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Did you consider something like a Synology NAS, which has free mobile apps for syncing?
    - batou 11y ago
      Yes. I had one. It died suddenly and left me with a £400 bill for a new one. Fortunately I backed up the NAS to an external disk but from this and other experiences, I've come to a general rule: the reliability of a backup system is inversely proportional to the number of moving parts Hence why I use beyond compare to manually sync files to two physical mediums from the master copy on my laptop. One encrypted USB stick I carry on me at all times and one hard disk that lives in a fire safe.
      - oracuk 11y ago
        Moving hard disks back and forth to my fire safe is a pain. A hardened usb disk that is itself fire-rated. That I would buy.
        batou 11y ago
        You would need one with the mass of a fire safe which somewhat nullifies the point.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Some companies sell fire-safe & waterproof HD enclosures which you can use without moving the disks.
        JosephRedfern 11y ago
        How about a fire-safe with a female USB port on the outside, and a male USB port on the inside - both connected? That would be cool.
        TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
        It's hard to make anything small fire-rated, due to thermal inertia (or rather, the lack thereof). I'm surprised I haven't seen a NAS with the hard drive enclosure fire-rated.
ytdht 11y ago
wow, only 22gb in 13 years? Do you lower your media's resolutions before archiving them? I thought about doing that with most of mine... but I would still need to go through the collection one by one to avoid doing it on my favorite ones even if I used exif metadata to rate most of them.
- batou 11y ago
  All photos are ~1.2Mb jpegs straight from a Nikon d3100 these days. I don't archive raws or process them other than perhaps rotation. Videos are h264 with a reasonable profile although this will change one day. The key to keeping it contained is to not keep everything. I'm not afraid to throw away stuff.

anon4 11y ago

The only digital life I'm worried about in the event of my untimely death is the few IRC channels I frequent. Just let those guys know I'm gone, put up a "He's dead, Jim, take what you want." on my GitHub and leave the rest to bit-rot. I don't think the cloud cares that I won't feed it data no more.

batou 11y ago
Write a dead man's switch script. You just have to remind it you're not dead once a month for example. However don't do what a colleague of mine did back in the early 00s. after a motorcycle accident he was in hospital for three weeks. This was back in the days before ubiquitous internet access (horrible times!). His dead mans switch went off after two weeks and caused an email to be sent to his boss to call him a vacuous cunt. Obviously that didn't go down well at all.
- paublyrne 11y ago
  Better to set it for two months.
  - SapphireSun 11y ago
    Why not six or a year? It'll be very hard to screw that up and you can Hari Seldon your friends and relatives.
    - XorNot 11y ago
      Except if you forget when it fires. These sorts of things aren't done because doing them right is actually very very hard.
      - kiiski 11y ago
        It could of course start sending a countdown to your email a month before going off.
    - 11y ago

DanBC 11y ago

Apple (in England) copper-bottoms laws, and require too much documentation. When a person dies their estate goes through probabte. You get official documents as a result. That documentarion is effectively a court order - they are good enough to get banks to release funds from the dead person's account to the executor of the will. Apple sometimes do not recognise those documents and refuse to unlock devices that used to belong to dead people, even if the device is mentioned in the dead person's will. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26448158 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26448158 Here they're not asking for access to the information - they just want the device to be unlocked. Apple recognised, after publication, that they'd made an error in this case, but they maintain that a court order is required for access to iCloud accounts. But they don't recognise grants of probate as valid court orders.

vitovito 11y ago
Apple's policies around deceased users' hardware and accounts has recently (early 2015) changed, so it's possible this particular problem wouldn't happen again. Dead users do appear to happen infrequently enough that not every CSR seems to know what to do when you call in about one, though. However, without court orders of some sort, you're probably completely out of luck. A death certificate used to be enough, but no longer. I found myself in that particular edge case (along with two Canadian families) earlier this year, as a relative had passed away in a state that did not mandate probate, and the family had elected to not go through the courts, and so had no legal documentation establishing an executor or estate. Apple ultimately said that they needed a court order to close the account or transfer the purchases to another one, otherwise the account and login would remain active forever, period.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Can purchases be transferred to someone in a will, or do they go to the executor of the estate? There has been talk of creating a legal trust to license digital purchases, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/22/digital_assets_and_death_who_owns_music_video_e_books_after_you_die.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/22/digital_a... & http://susanshare.com/kindle-books-and-itunes-apps-is-there-a-trust-for-that http://susanshare.com/kindle-books-and-itunes-apps-is-there-...

Udo 11y ago

"Facebook tends to “memorialise” their account – freeze them so they can be viewed, but providing no access to past messages. [...] Facebook also offended a fair number of bereaved people with its Year in Review clips [...] The problem was that for some, these were pictures of dead loved ones." Here is something I really don't understand. For some reason it's apparently preferred, both by Facebook as well as people overall, to rub out a deceased person's digital existence - as opposed to preserving a bit of their life and writing for posterity. To me, the "memorialization" of FB accounts looks like an almost cynical choice of words considering what it actually entails. Do we really prefer to pretend dead people never existed in the first place?

Sir_Substance 11y ago
>Do we really prefer to pretend dead people never existed in the first place? I think that we consider facebook, a commercial entity based on data-mining every scrap of information it holds, an inappropriate place to memorialise our loved ones.
- Udo 11y ago
  That's a separate question though. Fact of the matter is people do tend to put an enormous part of their lives on social media platforms. So it's on there right now, which is too late to consider if it was a good idea to trust an unreliable medium to steward your data to begin with. What I'm concerned about is that when a friend or family member dies, you have to cope with the loss of the person, but on top of that Facebook forcibly arranges for you the loss of all corresponding data as well. They're effectively saying "Well, this guy's dead now, so we're taking away the documentation of all shared memories with that person. We're honoring the deceased by erasing their digital existence as best as we can."
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    > we're taking away the documentation of all shared memories with that person They aren't taking anything away. See my earlier comment about what memorialization actually entails. Nothing is erased, the content is preserved for family and friends. Of course the account status is changed, it would be inappropriate for a dead person's account to show up in lists of contacts to invite to events, and so on.

marincounty 11y ago

I didn't read the article, but I get the drift. I knew a guy was in a very unhappy marriage. He didn't have a large online presence, but his posts and pictures were important to him. You couldn't tell he was in a unhappy marriage--unless you knew him. His wife was not in any of his pictures, nor did he talk about her. Well he died in his sleep one night. The next day, all his accounts were taken down. I don't know who removed all his accounts, but they were gone. My point is unless you have an agreement, or the surviving spouse is slandered in some way; I think, in most cases, if the surviving spouse should just use the passwords to convey the obituary notice. (I think I was bothered with just how quick his accounts vanished? All his accounts were on free sites. I didn't see any need to close them all down. Plus, after all the verbal abuse, and drama--his only enjoyment, or escapism was going online?)

evantahler 11y ago

A shared and synced 1password vault between family members is the best option I've seen so far. You can have your vault, a work vault, a family fault, etc which is kept in sync with separate permissions.

Theodores 11y ago

Relatively speaking those parents of mine are to pop their clogs one day (well, Burkenstock sandals, one day being many years hence). I would not be happy about deleting everything on their PC's, I would want stuff kept. However... With my own 'digital life' I would prefer people to just fdisk/powerwash my PC-style devices and send the things to the charity shop. There really would be nothing to see on any of my machines, the cloud can just be forgotten, nothing really matters. I don't know if others would see it that way though. My point being that 'what you would do' concerning your oh-so-precious online life is different to what you might think when it comes to someone else's digital life.

bryang 11y ago

Skype is one of my most hated programs. And a reason for that is the utter absurdity in regards to account deletion. You have to do fairly standard things like identify email, password and some contacts.... but you also have to know the EXACT month and year of which you signed up. And unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email up there is no possible way to find out. When I first signed up, I had a ridiculous name like everyone else did back in the day, and I wanted to just move on. Not very serious, I know, but this issue can be for many circumstances. I really wish that some legislation would be passed for a "Nuke" button standard on all digital platforms that allows you or a designed individual to erase profiles at will.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> And unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email there is no possible way to find out. What, do people really delete read email?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Before GMail a typical webmail provider gave you so little space that deleting irrelevant e-mails was standard practice; otherwise your inbox would soon fill up. Frankly, I had to delete my e-mails on school Linux server AND not so long ago, on company mailbox. Yes, this is ridiculous and yes, it happens.
- fao_ 11y ago
  I use a 503(c) service for email, the only thing is that they rely on dontations, so the more space I use the more it'll cost them. So out of being curteous to them, I delete any unwanted email. One other reason I delete email is because I like having a 'clean' inbox. But despite all of that, it's really Skype's fault for assuming that a user will keep randomly chosen, arbitrary data like that. Not all of us have photographic memories, so the vast userbase, as a result, will have great difficulty in deleting their account. There's also a very high probability that it's done by Skype deliberately, to stop people deleting their accounts (Because data mining is 'phun'!)

stretchwithme 11y ago

Hopefully, our loved ones' digital lives will hang around forever. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, after all. My half brother, who we just found in 2005, started a Facebook account before he died. He added me and never got around to adding anybody else. I can post things on his wall, but no one sees them. Both my parents have passed away and pass by them in my contacts. I won't deleting them, ever. I did update my Dad's location, though, just so I can always use that for directions to their grave.