We came. We saw. We Spoke.

Editor’s Note: Halloween. All Saints Day. El Día de los Muertos. The last three days of macabre celebrations have us contemplating not just our own lives after death, but the fate of our digital lives as well. What happens to our electronically connected self when our physical one, well…disconnects? Spoke friend and Vice Mayor of Cloud City Digital, Stephen Jenkins shares some practical advice to help ensure your data is handled with care, post-mortem.

It is a precious few of us who ponder life’s only truly inevitable milestone — its end. And of those there must be even fewer who think beyond the immediate needs of our families upon our untimely demise (is there such a thing as a timely demise?).

The scene is typical of television dramas: A grieving eldest son distributes the prized possessions of a beloved father recently deceased. The collection of fine paintings, bequeathed to William Jr., the rare books handed down to sister Elizabeth. But what of the iTunes collection? Will the blog be shut down? What about the Twitter followers? The Facebook friends? The LinkedIn connections? Can you bequeath these kinds of things?

Made for TV movies aside, informal observation reveals that most of our personal effects are less likely to be kept in a safe or a security deposit box, and instead take the form of digital assets like emails, chat transcripts, research documents, multimedia files, and financial records.

The importance of these various digital sundries varies of course, from the mundane yet practical (car insurance renewal confirmation), to the amusing (self portraits with an iPhone), to highly personal items replete with sentimental value (personal emails). Regardless of their practical value, these items were part of someone’s life, and should be treated with the same care and respect that their physical belongings would be given.

The recent rise in a viable marketplace for digital assets also raises some interesting questions. An MP3 collection may potentially possess some sentimental value, but it may also possess a sizable monetary value. Assuming the purchase of one album or movie per week from Apple’s iTunes Store, a person who had been purchasing music for 5 years would have amassed a collection worth nearly $3,000. Upon their death, what happens to these files? Can ownership be transferred to a family member, or does the collection remain intact but locked away in perpetual silence under a thin layer of DRM?

Similarly, in a world where we belong not only to the community that we live and work in, we increasingly belong to online communities that mirror in many ways the personal interactions and affiliations of the physical world. In the event of a community member’s death, what happens to their persona? One day they are posting their list of ten best foreign films or photos of their vintage typewriter collection, and the next day they are gone. Presumably their friends and family in the physical world (I’m avoiding the word “real”, which implies a lesser experience online) will have knowledge of their passing, and begin the grieving process, but in their online worlds has the person simply disappeared? In case of high profile members, the online community at large may know their real name and begin a search for them via traditional channels, but many community members remain essentially anonymous and their sudden disappearance leaves many questions unanswered. Would the deceased want the community notified? Is there a final message for them? Should email accounts be closed down, or left active, set to bounce the email back to the sender with a startling yet informative message?

Are there any practical answers, or are our digital existences destined to a life in limbo when our bodies have been laid to rest? I would suggest the following steps to ensure that your preferences are respected:

• Take an accounting of all your digital assets and online accounts, note any applicable logins and passwords.
• Decide who you’d like to have access to these things.
• Decide what you’d like done with them after you have died. Deleted, updated, shared, etc.

Once you have decided these things, you can proceed in a few ways. First, you can draft a physical document, which could be appended to your will. This document could specify the particulars of the three steps above, but more importantly, it could name a digital executor who would be responsible for carrying out your final wishes. This individual should be both technically competent and trustworthy, as you will be granting them access to your digital world in absentia. Your instructions to them could be as simple as shutting down all accounts and erasing your hard drive, or it could detail which email folders were shared with whom, and which photos be made available on Flickr as a final goodbye.

Another route would be to leverage technology to achieve the same result without the need for a lawyer’s involvement. Deathswitch.com is a web site that offers a service they describe as “Information Insurance”. It works as follows: One enters their list of desired contacts along with their email addresses, then they create a message containing the kind of account information discussed above. Next, a time interval is set. It could be once a day, it could be once a year. If the user does not log into the site during the specified interval, indicating that they are alive, the system will automatically send out their message to the people on their list. I cannot vouch for the security or functionality of this service (now that I think of it, can anyone?) which costs $20 a year to maintain, but in theory it is a practical approach to the dilemma of sharing information in the case of an unexpected (or perhaps expected) death with friends, family, and co-workers, all of which can receive custom messages. Just don’t forget to log in, or you, very much alive, may find yourself having to explain why half of your work email consists of fantasy baseball updates and why the password to your Facebook account is “ihearttwilight”.

Regardless of the approach you take to safeguarding the future of your digital life, it is important that you give some thought to it. Get organized, make a plan, and then live your life to the fullest, knowing that your digital afterlife is safe and sound.

by Stephen Jenkins