This past Monday I was on the Digital Death Panel at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX. Despite the fact that it was a talk on death that started at 9:30am on a Monday morning, 150 people showed up for what turned out to be an amazing panel. My co-panelists were John and Evan from The Digital Beyond (www.thedigitalbeyond.com), Dazza Greenwood (www.civics.com), and Adele McAlear (www.deathanddigitallegacy.com). We had a great chat and the twitter hashtag #digitaldeath was blowing up!
The panel served as a great teaser to the upcoming Digital Death Day on May 6 in Silicon Valley. I will be in attendance there this year and we’re expecting a big crowd!
The coolest part of the panel for me was watching the guy from ImageThink draw up the notes from the panel in real time. Check out the video of the panel below (note: audio doesn’t start until a few minutes into the video).
The term “digital death” has been floated around a lot lately. In fact, there was even a Digital Death Day in California and London! And this recent Mashable article discusses the 7 best services for all things related to digital death. But what is “digital death,” after all? When in doubt, you can do a Google search and find a Wikipedia article, right? Wrong. There’s really nothing out there that clearly defines this digital death term all that well. So, I’ll attempt to do it from our perspective here at Entrustet.
Digital death is actually a bit of a misnomer. Digital death actually refers to a physical death, coupled with a death-defying online presence that is immune to physical death. That is, the term “digitial death” ultimately refers to digital life outstanding a physical death. But for simplicity sake, and frankly because it sounds good, “digital death” will continue to mean basically everything related to this issue of humans dying and leaving traces of their life behind in digital form that will last forever until something is done with it.
Although we will all die as human beings, our digital footprint will last forever if untouched. Otherwise, our digital bits will meet one of the following fates: 1) intentionally deletion by a friend/family member, 2) transferred to an heir, or 3) some accounts may be deleted by service provider due to lack of use or fraudulent activity.
The important takeaway here is that you can control exactly what your own digital death (or virtual life) will look like long after you’re gone. In fact, you can do it for free and decide down to each individual account and computer file what your lasting digital legacy will be.
I attended the first Digital Death Day out in Mountain View earlier this year with Nathan Dosch of Digital Estate Planning. DDD2010 was a really interesting event and we talked about a whole range of issues. I met a ton of great people who are all passionate about the issues surrounding the digital afterlife and ideas regarding digital death and online memorization. Check out my post on DDD2010 for my recap or Wired’s post about Digital Death Day.
Stacey Pitsillidies, of DigitalDeath.eu is helping keep the conversation alive by spearheading Digital Death Day London in about three weeks. I had the pleasure of meeting Stacey at the inaugural Death Day and it’s great to see her continue pushing ahead with Digital Death topics.
If you are interested in attending DDD: London, check out the eventbrite site to find more info and registration details. If DDD: London is anything like DDD2010, it will definitely facilitate some great conversations.
Facebook has over 500m users worldwide and about 125m in the United States. Using CDC and Facebook Ads demographic data, we’ve calculated that over 375,000 US Facebook users will die this year. That’s more than 1 every 90 seconds. The scale of the problem is huge. Worldwide, assuming that Facebook’s users die at the same rate as Americans, 1.5m Facebook users will pass away this year, or about 3 every minute.
Think about that. 3 Facebook users die each minute. And its not just Facebook. Dave Winer of Scripting.com writes about how Amazon still sends him Father’s day reminders even though his father passed away last year. Winer was also one of the early writers on Facebook death. Broadjam, a site where bands can upload music, retains musicians’ songs after they pass away because they just don’t know when a user dies. Sites like Flickr and Picasa will ultimately delete users digital family photos if users stop paying and nobody picks up the slack after someone passes away. It’s a huge problem for almost every online service, but Facebook is on the leading edge because they are so big and people go there everyday with their real names and personal information.
How does Facebook Currently Deal with Death?
In Wortham’s article she talks about Courtney Purvin, who “got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.” The problem was that “[t]he friend had died in April.
“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” [Purvin] said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”
Facebook currently allows friends and family to memorialize the profile of a deceased person, which takes the deceased out of searches, does not all any new friend requests and stops asking people to “reconnect” with them. There is currently no way to permanently delete or hide a Facebook profile, although we’ve found that over 35% of people prefer that option over memorialization.
Currently, most people don’t know that they can memorialize Facebook profiles, so many profiles live on as “Facebook Ghosts” and continue to “haunt” their friends and families. For a longer overview, check out our post Facebook Death Policies.
Facebook [is] considering using software that would scan for repeated postings of phrases like “Rest in peace” or “I miss you” on a person’s page and then dispatch a human to investigate that account.
“We are testing ways to implement software to address this,” she said. “But we can’t get it wrong. We have to do it correctly.”
The scanning approach could invite pranks — as the notification form already has. A friend of Simon Thulbourn, a software engineer living in Germany, found an obituary that mentioned someone with a similar name and submitted it to Facebook last October as evidence that Mr. Thulbourn was dead. He was soon locked out of his own page.
Chin is right. Facebook needs to be very close to 100% in memorializing and deleting Facebook profiles or they will face a user backlash. Can you imagine receiving an email or notification saying “we think you might be dead…please prove you aren’t.” There are ways to get to a high confidence interval, but the final step needs to be verification with the government or approval of a valid death certificate. It is the only way to be 100% sure that someone is dead.
Solutions
Services like Entrustet allow users to decide whether they’d like specific online accounts deleted or transferred to someone else when they pass away. We also double verify that someone is indeed dead with an obituary and a valid death certificate. Our corporate partners program offers prepackaged and custom solutions for companies of all sizes that notify partners when we’ve verified that one of their users has passed away.
We believe that it will take a neutral third party to independently verify user deaths across the Internet. Our partners program will allow companies across the Internet to know when their users have passed away, along with what they wanted done with the account. We believe that companies should adopt a solution, rather than sweeping the problem under the rug. Facebook is a notable execption in that they’re trying to tackle the problem head on.
Internet companies can be good corporate citizens and be on the cutting edge of this growing problem by addressing it head on. It’s not just the right thing to do, but it will improve customer service, save time and save money.
It’s going to be an exciting year for our industry. We’d love to continue the conversation with anyone who’s interested.
What do you think? What should Facebook do? What do you want to happen to your Facebook profile when you pass away?
If you’re interested in being proactive about protecting your digital assets, you can sign up for Entrustet for free. Sign up takes less than 60 seconds.
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.
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.
