Entrustet Digital Property Reports Featured in The Guardian of London
By Nathan Lustig on Mar 21 th, with 0 COMMENT
Jesse’s panel on Digital Death at this year’s South By Southwest 2011 was a huge hit. There were over 150 people in the audience, including a reporter from the Guardian of London. Jemima Kiss wrote about how digital assets are changing the way we grieve and deal with death. From the article:
The big theme was consumer web technology powering into every part of the mainstream. As a particularly resonant session showed, this advance has gone so far that it is now seeping into how we think about death, and the digital legacy we might leave behind. John Romano of the specialist news site The Digital Beyond told how the family of one soldier killed in Iraq were refused access to his emails by Yahoo, how one author’s entire online body of work was deleted by a family who did not like it, and how one man struggled to wrest control of his dead wife’s Facebook page from abusive commenters.
Taboo, combined with a lack of prioritisation, means there is much to be done in creating a standard framework for sites to deal with processing death. Facebook has a form for reporting a dead account holder that only requires a link to a news report or memorial site as proof of death, which means anyone can take control of that account. Jesse Davies, of the digital asset management tool Entrustet, explained that hidden in Google’s terms and conditions are instructions on taking control of a deceased person’s account by printing and posting multiple documentation. “This is the same Google,” he said, “that just taught a car to drive itself.”
There are now 40 startups in the digital death field, and things have never look less morbid. From memorialisation to digital estate planning for all the data associated with sites on which we buy, share, live and play, digital death is a growth area. “One day we all buy the farm,” said Davies. “We’ll leave behind a mountain of data and mixed in with junk about stuff we’ve sold on eBay will be photos of our kids. We need a way to deal with this.” Despite being ghettoised in a venue several blocks from the main conference, which limited the amount of “cross-pollination” from other subject areas – usually a strength of SXSW – the new journalism sessions were often impressive. The New York Times’s interactive editor, Aron Pilhofer, argued convincingly against news apps as the future of news, saying the browser is the logical central focus for content development. “Community is a place where the web is your friend and the app is not,” he said. “If you consider community to be part of the answer to the future of news then going into the partially-stilted environment of the application walks away from that.” The omnipresent media commentator Jeff Jarvis led a session on privacy vs publicness by reliving deeply personal details of his experience of dealing with prostate cancer. Going public defied the physical impotence, prompting advice and support from readers and encouraging others to go for checkups.
