What happens to all of our digital "stuff" when we die? What can and should we do to prepare for it ahead of time?
This project is something I've thought about for years, but started getting organized here in earnest 2018 June 3, after an online conversation with irongeek_adc. I want this project to develop an outline, or a checklist, of steps to take to have your online profiles prepared for when you're not around. From your suvivors being able to access acounts, passwords, to postings becoming ephemeral, and disappearing after a certain amount of time, or maybe after you haven't checked in after X days, your profile may go into a dormant mode. There has to be a way for social media sites to understand that you're no longer around, and respond in kind. My hope is this project could spawn talks, and this reference manual or checklist for 'best practices' as we expand our online presence with an eye towards a time where we'll no longer be alive to shepard this content. In the future the hope is that this project becomes self sustainting, allowing others to take over and contribute to improvements when we're no longer here to contribute.
Kyle Bubp has provided an outline from his presentation on this topic, Outline of Things To Account For was transcribed from BSides Cincinnati 2018 - 2:00 PM - Kyle Bubp - Death, Dealing, and Digital Forensics, and is an excellent start as we build a bank of recommendations.
- Continue to add to, and detail, Kyle's outline
- Build a working checklist
- Build a website, so that whatever we save here in the project becomes a site, such as http://user-is-offline.github.io/ (lots of users won't know how to navigate Github's file listings, we need this to be more of a howto, along with a printable checklist)
The following links, posts, articles are good for more research and ideas going forward
- The idead of Cyber funerals in Wired
- Social media Heirs can access Facebook account of deceased relatives: German court
- Relateable comic
- A Twitter [thread on this topic](https://twitter.com/natashenka/status/1102238991842078720 (excellent comments too for ideas) (here's the Unrolled thread
- [Dead Facebook users could outnumber the living by 2069](https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/04/29/dead-facebook-users-could-outnumber-the-living-by-2069/
- Facebook adds new tributes section to memorialized profiles
- An option to delete a Facebook page once you die
- Another post https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2020/07/after-she-died-my-mother-reminded-me-that-the-internet-isnt-forever/