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Panel: Who Will Check My Email After I Die?
Panel: Will I Check Email After I Die?
Date/time: 5 p.m. Tuesday
Panelists: John Romano, senior Web developer at Capstrat, and Matt Ludwig, creative director and experience designer with mLdesign.
The gist: What happens to your online identity after you physically die?
Quotes: “There’s a great deal of money to be made here…death is important.” - Romano. “Consider the fact that you have digital assets.” - Ludwig. “What happens if you’re reincarnated and you want to assume that identity?” - random attendee.
Takeaways: Digital identity means the sum total of all that content you have created online throughout your life — photos, Twitter, e-mail, Facebook. We’re rushing into posting blindly without thinking about long-term ramifications. Yahoo has a policy that if you die, it will delete your account, Romano said, so that if you have photos on Flickr, they’ll away.
Ludwig wants to launch a start-up that will give you a time-release e-mail after death. He says there are people that will care about your content after your death, and wonders what will happen to the content and who really has ownership of it.
Romano said content on sites like Facebook or Twitter is legally theirs. One attendee said the companies don’t want to pay to store virtual items left by dead people. There was a big debate over how digital assets are recognized in wills, and it varies state by state. People can alert loved ones to what their passwords are before death. But there was some confusion as to whether this is legal.
Also, if you give somebody access and you have already died, the companies that run these sites might not be able to tell you’ve died. And, how do you prove an e-mail or Web page belonged to a certain person?
Romano said companies won’t give people access to the next-of-kin without significant documentation. A lot of companies put pages in a “memorial” state — they don’t delete but can’t post to it.
There are lots of businesses that have sprouted up to try and solve some of these problems. One is called the Great Goodbye — it sends a postmortem message to your loved ones. There is Asset Lock, Vital Lock and Legacy Locker, which lock up your digital assets and give passwords and access to loved ones.
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