it's your legacy... Entrustet HIWI Blog

Rob Walker’s article in the New York Times Magazine called Cyberspace When You’re Dead has stimulated some great conversation in the NY Times comments, Twitter, Facebook and on NPR’s San Francisco affiliate KQED.  The article provides a great summary of all of the issues surrounding digital afterlife and provides Entrustet as one of the solutions to help people make a plan while they are still alive.

Walker’s article raises some great issues and is the most comprehensive piece I’ve seen so far besides Evan Carroll and John Romano’s recent book called Your Digital Afterlife. I was most interested in two parts of Walkers article (besides for the parts about Entrustet of course!).  First, I really enjoyed the part about “future proofing” our content.

Many people believe that anything that’s digital is better preserved than the physical version, but many times this is not the case.  We still have paper from Egyptians, but we’ve managed to lose digital data from the 1960s as formats have changed.  I’ve personally lost all of my school papers from 3rd-8th grade because they were saved on Corel’s WordPerfect, which is no longer compatible with anything that I’ve found.  The data is there, but I can’t open it.  I still have a few print outs of my favorite papers, so in this case paper has outlasted digital.

Dave Winer of Scripting.com (and fellow Wisconsin grad) has been writing about this issue for a few years and believes that old, established stakeholders like libraries, universities, insurance companies or potentially a new non-profit should be the ones to make sure that content is transferred to the newest formats so that it is not lost.  He’s written that services like Entrustet are not really needed because people cannot be sure that we will be around or that the formats will be current.

I don’t think Winer’s ideas and services like Entrustet are mutually exclusive.  We provide access to accounts, but don’t do anything to make sure that the formats are up to date.  We acknowledge that we don’t fully solve the longevity problem and would love to see a large, established stakeholder start to offer archival services in simple, plain text formats.  I would love to see an insurance company offer a “data insurance policy” of some sort that would allow someone to upload documents and photos that would be saved “forever” and continually updated into new formats.  For the shorter term, simply allowing access is a huge step forward.  We also expect that Entrustet users will continue to add new accounts with new formats as they continue to live their lives.

The other interesting aspect of Walker’s article was the part about family members not knowing what to do with digital assets.  Mac Tonnies was a very active blogger with many online friends and his family was fairly computer illiterate.  When he passes away unexpectedly, his family inherited his computer and digital presence, but did not know if it was valuable or worth saving.  His online friends stepped in to save the information and now his parents love being able to get to know another side of their son even after he passed away.

Another story was of Leslie Harpold, an active blogger who died suddenly.  Harpold did not leave any instructions behind for her family, so her family let her digital presence expire, preferring to remember her for her relationships, not her online presence.  Harpold’s online friends were dismayed, but they could not do anything to preserve her online content.  Harpold’s story raises two interesting points:  how much of what we do online actually represents who we are?  And if you want your online information to outlive you, you must tell other people so that they know what to do.

The beauty of Entrustet’s solution is that you can proactively decide what you’d like to happen to your facebook, blog, twitter, domain names and digital photos.  For me, I want my blog to stay, but I’d like my facebook and twitter deleted.  I want my brother to have access to my digital photos, since I trust him to keep the good and get rid of the not so flattering.  Even if you don’t want to use an online solution, it’s important to at least start the conversation with your family, your attorney or a close friend so that if something does happen to you, your family will be able to follow your last wishes.  If you do nothing, you push the tough decision to your survivors and risk them choosing an option you otherwise would not have.

The callers on KQED’s Forum show raised some great questions too.  I was able to answer most of them on the show, but here’s a few I wasn’t able to get to:

A recently widowed woman called in to say that she did not know what to do about her recently deceased husband’s Facebook account.  She had just changed her marital status from Married to Widowed, which she said was a huge step, even though it was only one click.  I can sympathize: it took me over a year to delete both of my grandmothers from my cell phone after they passed away.  Although it was only one click, it was extremely hard to do.

The caller talked about how there is no established protocall for online accounts.  Do you keep facebook up for 1 year?  Do you delete it right away? Do you memorialize it?  We’re in a new frontier and it will be interesting to see how this area of grieving evolves.

Another caller asked how he could trust services like Entrustet because we’re a startup.  He wanted to know how he could be sure we would be around when he eventually passed away, hopefully not for a long time.  We believe that someone has to come up with a solution to this problem, whether it’s Entrustet or another company.  We’ve set aside enough money to run our servers for two years in case we can no longer run the business.  In the event that we were to go out of business, we will send out an email to all of our users and provide a way for users to either delete their information or download it so that they can transfer it to another service.  We believe that this is the right thing to do and that it should give our users the piece of mind they need to trust that their data will be there when they need it.

The host of the show asked if we were being insensitive by marketing to attorneys by telling them that they could make more money.  I wish I had said that attorneys that ignore digital assets are not fully protecting their clients.  It’s not just that attorneys can make more money, but they are neglecting an entire class of assets if they don’t ask their clients about their digital assets.  We have a ton of educational materials for attorneys on our website so that they can learn how to incorporate digital assets into their clients’ wills and trusts.

I’ll leave this post with a comment from one of our Entrustet users regarding Walker’s NY Times article:

This article is so impressive because it provides such a vivid characterization of the extent and significance of digital assets.  I had been thinking it was mostly just about closing out accounts after a death but this opened my eyes to the amazing array of Flicker photos, Tweets, fb updates, etc. etc. that comprise a person’s online persona.  Facebook’s concept of converting an account to a memorial is really cool though likely not for everyone and not necessarily something that can be easily automated.

If you have more questions, shoot us an email or write to us in the comments.

Tags:

cyberspace when you're dead · dave winer future proofing · digital death · digital legacy · kqed · npr · ny times