I concur, with the following additional reasons. First, depending on what you meant by "mess up": there's a chance they're not trustworthy (would read something you don't want read), and there's also a chance they screw up (and lose what you want sent - or send it when it shouldn't be sent).
Perhaps an even bigger thing for me is that an email seems so... off-hand, informal. I think if a friend/relative/etc died and an email was automatically sent to me from them I would feel a lot less... less something, can't quite think of the word, than if I got a properly written letter. Less sentimental I guess, less appreciative of it.
I have the feeling the idea is to have mails go to stuff like your projects mailing lists or online friends, more than managing your real life heritage.
We've been working on a product very similar to this for a long time. Traction is difficult, and few people respond well to fear mongering and/or premeditative thoughts that their life may be in danger. In addition, top of mind is also a challenge because the nature of an emergency creates an overload of emotion and therefore often confusion.
The social venture fund I work for provides this product for free because we service underserved and often low-income people in high crime areas around the world. Unfortunately we haven't made the product itself more accessible but we are working on an Android app that will function on some of the cheapest Android phones.
I've actually been looking for this for a long time. I like to travel around and often wonder what will happen to my digital legacy (code, internet bank accounts, subscriptions to all kinds of things, scanned documents). My previous solution was to e-mail an encrypted file to my parents and give them the password to it on a note, which was then put in the safe. I'll try the site but I'm a bit wary of whether or not it actually works. After all, if you disappear off the face of the planet then you won't be able to check that it actually works.
Edit: it also seems like a perfect target for hacking, as people may write information there that evil people could profit from greatly.
I would recommend that everyone encrypts the emails that go on the service, as obviously we can't do it ourselves (we have to actually be able to read them to send them out!).
Something similar could be constructed using Shamir's Secret Sharing (for example) [1], where the involved parties would have to communicate (and thus know each other) to retrieve the secret from their parts. The linked service surely is easier to handle but such a scheme would not depend on any trusted host (except yourself as you know the secret and share the parts). Possibly a combination of both would be great, to ease the communication issue and still keep security high.
I'm a little unclear on what problem you're trying to solve. Are you saying you should wait for a second place to set up such a service, sign up for both, and use a simple secret sharing scheme[1] to ensure that only once both go out does anyone know the original message? Or does that not solve the problem you were talking about?
[1]Which in this case would probably just be -- since in this case you don't want it to be reconstructible without all the pieces, and there's not much need for there to be more than 2 -- picking a random string of bits, sending that to one and the XOR with the original to the other.
A cousin passed away few years back with cancer.
It wasn't sudden but wasn't expected either. (He was 37 and responding well to treatment).
His wife was completely uninterested with regards to finances and bills.
He was quite meticulous and wrote down every single account he owned, details like account number, login, password in an excel spreadsheet. It was a lot of help for her.
I worry about security of such a system. I also worry about security of online services for using such a system.
I also worry if my wife would be able to locate that file.
Well, the best thing would be to write up all that, print it out, and put it in the same safe-deposit box that holds your will. Of all the storage media we have, paper is still the best proven for long-term retrieval.
I would encrypt it, store the passphrase somewhere (or tell it to your wife) and put (a link to) the file up on DMS. This way, you have nothing to lose.
There are a surprising number of services that do this. No one seems to have gotten any traction though. We decided to make it a video service instead of an email service.
We're actually launching our version this friday. If you read this after Aug 19th, it will be at http://senotable.com but right now it's at http://beta.senotable.com. Bugs are basically worked out now if you want to check it out. We'll probably advertise the launch on HN Saturday.
It would be cool if this service could monitor your Twitter/Facebook/etc for signs of life to cut down on the link-clicking required, and to add more resilience in the case of spam filtering.
There is a similar service that does monitor your Twitter/Facebook to check for activity. It's http://www.afteridie.org . I haven't really looked into it, though.
I worked on a similar project called seNotable (mentioned by dgunn) that uses public information to determine if the user has passed a way. Seems like there are quite a few of these services.
I've been thinking about this a bit after the shootings in Norway, and the deadly earthquake in my city a few months ago. I think that I have two requirements in order to be able to die happily: that I have said everything I need to say, and that other people can understand me (think 'speaker for the dead', so that people can understand what was important to me and what I believed in). I have many things I want to do before I die, but if these two needs are provided for, I can honestly die without regret. Everything else is just dependent on me living out my convictions.
Certainly we should regularly tell people that we love them, that they are important to us, etc, but I think being able to say a final goodbye is an entirely different thing. I hope my brother understands how much of a role model he is to me (and I will try to make sure he does know), but even so I would appreciate the chance to say so, one last time. My parents know I love them, but I think they would treasure a post-mortem letter saying exactly that.
However, I agree with everyone who pointed out that emails are a bit impersonal. I would prefer to be able to hand-write letters, and have them automatically posted via regular mail. I think that would be a pleasant surprise.
This seems scary. The risk of the confirmation emails being interpreted as spam or not seen is just way too high.
Due to the sensitivity of the information being sent out, there is zero margin for error. Even an after death personal message is pretty hefty if it's a false positive.
I would much rather prefer a service that requires my family to get to the info from a will or lawyer to gain access to my sensitive info.
I'd be interested to hear about the business model to this.
I've often entertained the idea of creating a piece of software to tend to certain things after my passing, beyond just sending out a batch of emails. It could reply to emails with canned responses for certain people, even a little AI to respond to questions. Sounds pretty narcissistic now that I think about it. Who really wants to be pestered with emails from dead people?
To the contrary, it may ensure bridges are there when you aren't, and may tell people how you feel when you're not around to.
Example: there are a lot of people whom I care about, but who - with no ill will involved - we've drifted off in our own directions as life tends to. We have vague contact info, and lacking that have mutual friends who can pass things on if need be. Come my demise, I may want a mass-emailing to thank them, ask for casual assistance for my dependents, and generally give a warm farewell. When I went in for heart surgery, I let one of the group know, in case it didn't turn out well; going in wasn't enough to warrant interrupting everyone and writing paper letters, but if I didn't come out someone needed to spread the word ("Hey, remember Carl? he's gone now, but says 'hi, thanks for the memories'"). Not worth printing up stacks of physical letters and burdening someone with putting then-required postage etc., but makes it easy to let people know how you feel when it's too much overhead all around now (hey, that's a big reason why people hate Facebook: too many updates), but when it is important to do so is exactly when you can't.
I was just thinking this is a lot like a coin flipping trick I heard once. You flip a coin for a decision, notice whatever you're secretly hoping the coin lands on, put the coin back in your pocket without looking at it, and do what you secretly wanted the coin to tell you to do.
With this service, go ahead and fill out what you want the emails to say... and then just send them.
I remember a service like this at least 6 years ago, possibly much longer - would be interesting to see if they are still around and if they ever had to "activate" for anyone.
I all but launched to users one of these in 1999 (deathswitch, I even let the domain lapse in 2003) and decided that I'd have two kinds of customers, those I didn't want to be responsible for , and nutters. Didn't launch. Happy to see this person do so!
I always wondered why aggrieved FBI / CIA agents don't use this type of service to mail out their uncensored memoirs to 100 different newspapers & underground conspiracy nuts.
Obviously this site is a huge target for government organizations who have a lot of secrets - whenever a service like this springs up I bet the first order of business is for someone to install a permanent tap on it, and a way to block the emails if need be.
What if my email provider, let's call it @MySuperAwesomeEmailProvider.com just goes out of business and decided to stop the service. Then I can't answer to the emails you will "life-ping" me with. And I won't even be able to change my email address on your system because I would have lost my account password. And then the next day, I don't think I would be able to go out.
I like the idea of having a service like this. However, I am worried about having one centralized service for this kind of thing. Interested parties, like certain government agencies will have a high interest in hacking it. I hope no one who really needs a dead man's switch as an insurance will use this service, if it ever get's big.
I think I've seen services like this before, and either way would rather get a physical person/company with some recourse for acting incorrectly to do it.
But, take a look at the favicon. The broken lemniscate is bizarrely poignant/morbid for a 16*16 pixel square. Neat design.
I've been working on a similar concept for a while too. I can only hope that mine turns out better (not that this one is bad - rather, if this one is better than mine, then mine is pretty useless!)
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
For this, I'd rather have a lawyer, a safe, a bank box... Anything that would end up dealing with my friends and family if I died.
[+] [-] corin_|14 years ago|reply
Perhaps an even bigger thing for me is that an email seems so... off-hand, informal. I think if a friend/relative/etc died and an email was automatically sent to me from them I would feel a lot less... less something, can't quite think of the word, than if I got a properly written letter. Less sentimental I guess, less appreciative of it.
[+] [-] riffraff|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leif|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxlpshr|14 years ago|reply
The social venture fund I work for provides this product for free because we service underserved and often low-income people in high crime areas around the world. Unfortunately we haven't made the product itself more accessible but we are working on an Android app that will function on some of the cheapest Android phones.
http://www.buddyguard.org
[+] [-] rheide|14 years ago|reply
Edit: it also seems like a perfect target for hacking, as people may write information there that evil people could profit from greatly.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
Also, law enforcement.
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s2r2|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
[+] [-] Sniffnoy|14 years ago|reply
[1]Which in this case would probably just be -- since in this case you don't want it to be reconstructible without all the pieces, and there's not much need for there to be more than 2 -- picking a random string of bits, sending that to one and the XOR with the original to the other.
[+] [-] prpon|14 years ago|reply
He was quite meticulous and wrote down every single account he owned, details like account number, login, password in an excel spreadsheet. It was a lot of help for her.
I worry about security of such a system. I also worry about security of online services for using such a system. I also worry if my wife would be able to locate that file.
Are there any schemes that work for you?
[+] [-] quanticle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgunn|14 years ago|reply
We're actually launching our version this friday. If you read this after Aug 19th, it will be at http://senotable.com but right now it's at http://beta.senotable.com. Bugs are basically worked out now if you want to check it out. We'll probably advertise the launch on HN Saturday.
[+] [-] kalleboo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcanterb|14 years ago|reply
I worked on a similar project called seNotable (mentioned by dgunn) that uses public information to determine if the user has passed a way. Seems like there are quite a few of these services.
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chad_oliver|14 years ago|reply
Certainly we should regularly tell people that we love them, that they are important to us, etc, but I think being able to say a final goodbye is an entirely different thing. I hope my brother understands how much of a role model he is to me (and I will try to make sure he does know), but even so I would appreciate the chance to say so, one last time. My parents know I love them, but I think they would treasure a post-mortem letter saying exactly that.
However, I agree with everyone who pointed out that emails are a bit impersonal. I would prefer to be able to hand-write letters, and have them automatically posted via regular mail. I think that would be a pleasant surprise.
[+] [-] chrisgoodrich|14 years ago|reply
Due to the sensitivity of the information being sent out, there is zero margin for error. Even an after death personal message is pretty hefty if it's a false positive.
I would much rather prefer a service that requires my family to get to the info from a will or lawyer to gain access to my sensitive info.
I'd be interested to hear about the business model to this.
[+] [-] wtn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] postfuturist|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andre|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|14 years ago|reply
To the contrary, it may ensure bridges are there when you aren't, and may tell people how you feel when you're not around to.
Example: there are a lot of people whom I care about, but who - with no ill will involved - we've drifted off in our own directions as life tends to. We have vague contact info, and lacking that have mutual friends who can pass things on if need be. Come my demise, I may want a mass-emailing to thank them, ask for casual assistance for my dependents, and generally give a warm farewell. When I went in for heart surgery, I let one of the group know, in case it didn't turn out well; going in wasn't enough to warrant interrupting everyone and writing paper letters, but if I didn't come out someone needed to spread the word ("Hey, remember Carl? he's gone now, but says 'hi, thanks for the memories'"). Not worth printing up stacks of physical letters and burdening someone with putting then-required postage etc., but makes it easy to let people know how you feel when it's too much overhead all around now (hey, that's a big reason why people hate Facebook: too many updates), but when it is important to do so is exactly when you can't.
[+] [-] DanielStraight|14 years ago|reply
With this service, go ahead and fill out what you want the emails to say... and then just send them.
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skimbrel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elliottcarlson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdibona|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkeypizza|14 years ago|reply
Obviously this site is a huge target for government organizations who have a lot of secrets - whenever a service like this springs up I bet the first order of business is for someone to install a permanent tap on it, and a way to block the emails if need be.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawlit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amurmann|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zethraeus|14 years ago|reply
But, take a look at the favicon. The broken lemniscate is bizarrely poignant/morbid for a 16*16 pixel square. Neat design.
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
http://www.stochastictechnologies.com/
I hadn't noticed how well it fits until you pointed it out, I think I'll keep it.
[+] [-] JimboOmega|14 years ago|reply