Entrustet HIWI Blog

I attended Digital Death Day 2010 last week Thursday in Mountain View, California (check out my preview post from last week).  I flew out to California with Nathan Dosch of The Digital Estate Planning Blog as well.  Digital Death Day brought thought leaders from our industry together into one room in Silicon Valley to discuss the issues surrounding digital estate planning.  We talked about company policies for transferring digital assets, the legal issues surrounding digital estate planning and what companies like Entrustet have been doing to help bring clarity to the situation.  Check out Evan Carroll’s post on The Digital Beyond for a good recap of the attendees.

Digital Death Day was organized by a group led by Kaliya Hamlin and brought together some of the most interesting people from the industry.  We talked about a whole host of topics, all relating to the question of “what happens to your digital assets when you pass away?”  I’ll try to summarize some of the main discussion points that were covered in the sessions at DDD.

It’s A Growing Industry, but Still in Infancy

There were about 35 people at DDD at its peak and pretty much everyone agreed that the industry is growing, fast.  In summer 2008, while Jesse was first working on Entrustet, he couldn’t find any information about the industry on the internet.  Now, a Google search returns many companies and tons of articles discussing the issues.  We even have two industry blogs dedicates to the industry: The Digital Beyond by Evan Carroll and John Romano and Death and Digital Legacy by Adele McAlear.  The Digital Beyond guys are even writing a book that will be published next year.

I has the pleasure of meeting Stacey Pitsillides, a student from London, who is writing her thesis on issues surrounding digital assets and digital inheritance.  Check out her blog and Twitter Rest In Pixels, for more info.  I expect to see 5-10x more people at next year’s DDD 2011.

What are the Current Company Policies Regarding Transferring and Deleting Digital Assets of Deceased Users and What Should They Be In the Future?

I co-hosted a session with Gail Williams from The Well, a web community that’s been around for 25 years.  We talked about issues that The Well has had with accounts of users who have passed away, then I helped walk the group through our research in the Digital Executor Toolbox that details what large companies have been doing.  We talked about how there are really only 5-6 companies that have been forward thinking on the issue and our stat that 285k US based Facebook users would pass away this year definently made some waves.

We moved on to talking about what company policies should be.  A consensus developed around the fact that companies did not want to get into the death verification business and that companies need help crafting changes to their terms of service to accomodate transfers of digital assets after death.  We brainstormed some ideas and are going to continue to try to work out a model terms of service for companies that want to transfer and delete users’ digital assets according to their wishes.

The law is WAY behind the times and is not likely to catch up soon

One of the most popular sessions was headed by Attorney Joshua Hunt from Sandy, UT and Nathan Dosch of The Digital Estate Planning Blog.  They covered some of the legal issues surrounding the industry and the consensus was that the law was extremely archaic and outdated when it comes to digital assets.  Other attorney in attendance included Susan Gibbs and Mary Ruddy.  Eli Edwards provided extensive expertise in Second Life’s issues with allowing inheritance of digital property produced in the game and Kathy Lane, who’s written two books about estate planning and digital assets had great perspective and a sharp legal mind.

From the estate planning perspective

Attorney Nathan Dosch talked about writing wills for Jesse and me that included our digital assets.  Jesse and I debuted our wills with a press release the day after Digital Death Day.  We think we’re two of the first people in the world to create wills to include our digital assets. The only other case we’ve been able to find was this guy in India who has so far been anonymous.  Digital Assets in wills is growing and we believe will be standard in the near future.

Identity

Many of the sessions surrounded our online identity, how to identify us online, our online legacy and whether it was a good thing to have all of our digital assets preserved.  There were strong opinions on both sides, which made for great discussion.  Sam Beal of Online Legacy and Gordon Clarke of Family Search provided interesting perspective on this discussion, as did Cameron Hunt. Kaliya Hamlin (identiywoman on twitter) had good thoughts here as well.

Industries in need of help

We also talked about how digital estate planning is going to affect industries that have been traditionally offline like funeral homes and obituaries.  Ryan Thogmartin of Connecting Directors, writes a popular site about how funeral directors can become more tech savvy to serve their clients.  We talked about how digital assets are becoming a large part of people’s estate and that funeral directors are poised to help out.  I also spoke with Pierre Wolff, from Sympathy Tree, an online obituary and memorial service about how digital assets are affecting the way people are remembered online.  Darren Jack of Impact360 talked about how his firm searches for lost assets that belong to people’s estates and how digital assets are the new frontier that his company would like to be a part of.

Summary

Digital Death Day was a great event and I’m hoping that there is another one in 2011.  We’ve formed a working group dedicated to raising awareness of digital assets and inheritance, so i’m interested to see what comes out of it.