 and introduce ourselves and also maybe one sentence on why we find this important or interesting. Does that sound sound good? Okay, sweet. My name is Heather. The reason why I'm interested in this topic is because we all will die. Seems reasonable. Also, our data dies and in general in our living lives the preservation of data is really difficult as individuals and I think it's really important to think about like having a plan for keeping your data alive after you are not. Hi, I'm Andy. I am also currently acting on the untested assumption of my own mortality and I am also by profession among several other things in a state planner. So helping people plan for their mortality is one of the things that I do and that includes this question of what happens to your data when you die. And it's a question that I think our legal system does not yet have adequate answers to and I'm so captivated by the discussions around this question. Two years ago my father died and it left me with this bizarre detective journey because I could prove that he was alive in the United States but I couldn't prove that he was alive in the Philippines, his nation of birth and that had weird implications for my infant half-sister at that time. Does this work? I've always just been fascinated by how we live online and how we die online and I've seen I remember seeing deceased people's Myspace pages a long time ago and seeing the first things like that and I just think it's interesting. I'm Sans Fish and I'm here because I had a friend who I just met at a conference earlier this year, passed away shortly after the conference and his Facebook page acted as an ad hoc community for all of the people grieving and wanting to share pictures and stories about him and it was rewarding and special and I'd like to talk more about it. My name is Sarah Watson. I'm a fellow at the Berkman Center. I'm really interested in this because my aunt has done a lot of genealogical research on our family so I have like 16 generations of family members listed by her and so I actually really wonder about the flip between analog and digital and how all of that will get incorporated into these like longer-term histories of lives. I'm Laura Newhouse and I am interested in this conversation because there are just aren't enough conversations about death to begin with and also I'm interested in the question of ownership and who owns all of this data. Do we put it in a will or not? My name is Erin and I'm also interested in concepts like a will around data. I think as we pour more and more information into various digital platforms a lot of that has value either personally or economically or in other ways and there aren't a lot of good solutions right now. People don't typically do a lot of planning around what happens to their digital data and content and so that's always really interested me and I've also been really interested in what happens to people's various online profiles and presences and websites and things after they pass away and then what other people do with those and what some people who've had thoughts about this before they pass away actually decided for themselves how they wanted their digital presence to be handled after they died. My name is Kevin and I'm here because I never thought about this problem before but it made me think about when I should tell somebody the password to my e-bill for my energy bill because otherwise that just keeps charging or just keeps building up and every other password I have to my entire like online life. Amber Case I'm in the circle because you and your data are not any different than you and like yourself so whatever your like your data can live on without you existing like traditionally you would die and if you wrote a book that would live on and people could like interact with your brain even though you weren't alive anymore and now you have this data but there's like 50 or 60 accounts and you need to be able to give that data to somebody or at least log in so that you don't keep appearing and people Spotify listen to streams and become recommended friends with people which is really really freaks people out that's why I'm here. Hey I'm CJ I study computational stylometry in music and writing which is a way to extract style right which is very hard and amorphous problem but you can use to identify people and well one interesting idea is that you can extract the style of dead composers. Well one researcher was able to extract the style of Mozart and make more music in the style of Mozart and even confuse experts in Mozart and it's also related because I have one of my best friends passed away he was a musician and we had always been talking about this and and that I would make an algorithm that would make more music in the in the style of his music and that that's one of my projects too. What is interesting? I apologize I'm a little late to this okay I apologize I'm late I'm Josh I'm checking out this conference on network mortality right and I'm interested in seeing what what it has and how if it relates to sort of storing an identity or a connectome model or you know whatever other interesting things this topic has to offer thank you. Alright so I'm Willow and I proposed this session because this is a website that I launched recently is network mortality.com it's a wiki setup and it's basically I so two things happened where I had this idea for a long time of wanting to donate my body to science but being in Cambridge and around amazing people who are all dedicated to open access and open source month that I decided that I wanted to donate my body to open access science which is a very apparently complicated thing to say because our entire medical system and the research around it is built upon anonymizing people rather than encouraging anyone to to understand what's going on. That in combination with one of my most private and prolific friends dying who was an encryption nerd who also had a lot of unpublished music and writing that she had wanted to get out there but then she died has opened up a whole lot of interesting questions so because I am socially compulsive as you all might have noticed I decided to facilitate my own death so I'm setting up this wiki and all of the the process not facilitating like I'm suicidal I'm not it's okay I mean so this wiki is a setup of how I have architected what the process of postmortem will be for me and mine and so I'm hoping that other people will get involved with this space and indicate their own because my threat model what might go wrong in this setup is different for me than it is for other people. I travel a lot I'm in other countries where I won't be identifiable because anything that I die with on me is going to be stolen and so how do I deal with notification of people what dead men switches look like if no one is if I'm not responding to something will it automatically post to something how do I deal with my passwords etc so I'm gonna give a really quick overview of this but my hope and dream is that you all will perhaps contribute to the same space so that other people can learn from our setup as well so one part of this is a mailing list it's called well fuck comma blue at Google groups it is a confined list of people who can post to it but because I am a member of a lot of very strange and far flung social groups online there's no way that many of them would find each other my mother has no reason to post to the kink groups that I'm a part of have no reason to talk to my friend from preschool who lives on a tiny remote farm in Oregon has no reason to talk to my academic groups that I'm a part of right so there are all of these groups that I am deeply embedded in via the internet that otherwise would not be able to communicate at all and based on my friend's death it really sucks to be told by a faceless mass of internet that someone you are very close to has died and so I really I know that it's impossible to dictate but I can encourage that a small group of people finds out first are there to support each other and then I've left instructions in a password vault of how to notify these other communities so anybody on the list is tasked with notifying a group of people so academics family members etc and they have basic instructions of how to find those people in my contact book so the hundreds of people that are in my contact book which is also in my password vault are tagged in a specific way so then they all will get an email as well and so there's basically this rolling function of people being included and notified with the wishes that I have of what to do with my data being passed on as well all of these people have been notified of this they've consented to it death is a really hairy thing to talk about sometimes and so saying like this is what I expect of you if you say okay to this are you okay with it it's okay to say no and having a conversation about it is is important outstanding questions are this whole donating my body to open source science also in can we have a data repository I want my online accounts to be shut down so that my friends are not encouraged to listen to my Spotify list that is fucking heartbreaking but I want them to still know what was on my Spotify list so that if they seek out listening to that on their own they have that option so these are all fascinated questions go what your system have like a dead man switch in the sense of you message it to keep it private and then when you're don't message it then it kind of springs out the the emails or the contact list or something like that so then that would happen so in other words it works as almost a dead man switch you keep messaging it like once a month or once a week then once that switch doesn't get it so this is one so this is one of the things about different threat models I don't have that because sometimes I'm in Dar es alarm or I'm in a ring a district and there's no connectivity and I don't want people to have that moment of terror and so I haven't set that up for myself I don't have a reason to code that but if someone in this group has a reason to have that set up then I'd love it to be in the same place that other people can make use of that code as well I can imagine having a partner for that too right so if you're in Dar es alarm and somebody else knows that then they can flip the switch for you or what have you right so that you're at least you know modeling it in such a way that there are less heart attacks or you know somebody that's close enough to you to know where you are geographically can verify that I'm curious how you've thought about having an individual or set of individuals managing like your hard drive data I think that when I've been thinking about that for my own like living will or whatever I find it hard to figure out like should my mother be a part of that because certainly she would care about me as a person but her ability to like manage data is terrible like she wouldn't know actually how to deal with it and then it's like I have some really amazing archivist type friends but like do they know me very intimately and would they care probably not so that's something where it's set up in a both a shared secret way so my the password to my password vault so my all of my password vault is stored online but it's encrypted so anyone could get to the encrypted file and I until we hit quantum computing it's fairly secure but the password is split into two halves and two people have each half so there are four people total but it only takes the proper two of them in order to unlock it and these are people who have no reason to talk to each other except that they're on this list the mailing list so then they'll unlock it the thing about that is that my archivist friends and my mother can talk together about how to deal with it and that's a part of the thing that they opted into that said in the same way that I hope we all have the friend that knows where all of our stuff in our houses that our mothers and fathers have a right not to know about in the same way that we go in and take care of those things after our friend dies I have color coded all of my files it's and then there's an instruction of these things are deleted these things can be parsed and then published and these things can be published wholesale and so there's a like you unlock my file delete these things and then pass it on to my mom and my archivist friends totally compulsive by the way yeah I was just gonna say it's I think actually fairly common to have not necessarily that intricate but at least somebody you know designated as like okay if I pass away it's your job to go and delete my porn before my mom gets my computer like that's a really normal thing for people to have set up but I wanted to flag one of the other things will have said as really super important that almost nobody thinks about which is that you have those four people who each have half of your password to your password vault because if you haven't left those passwords to anybody if some part of it is stored only in your head one of the things that we're seeing happen is okay you get all your bank statements electronically which means there's no actual paper paper trail of where your accounts are which means now your executor right is going to Yahoo with your letters of administration and saying I am willows personal representative and I need access to this email account so that I can get the bank statement so I can figure out where the money is to pass on to the heirs and Yahoo says take a hike will it doesn't own that account we own that account and the access to it died with her and you'll never get into it and even if your personal representative would win that lawsuit which is not yet clear the last thing you want to have happen at your death is people suing each other just to figure out where your stuff is so it's really super important to have something like that where some person or set of people can actually get into your digital accounts without requiring court action when you die two factor authentication so first can we make room for two more chairs one for Sam and one for an extra thank you hey thank you okay so the thing about password vaults is also that one you can have complicated passwords and you only have to remember one and of course that means that there's a single point of failure so it's a cost benefit analysis again with threat modeling but right now Google determines what to do with your Google data and whether or not to allow anyone in and Facebook determines whether or not to make like what to do with that data which I think is is bullshit like it's not it's not acceptable so plus one on that as far as two factor authentication goes Chris do you want to scoot into are you okay I like everyone to feel warm and fuzzy and two factor authentication usually there's a safety code like there's a set of a few codes that you can use if you've lost your phone or whatever and so embedding a couple of those into the password vault is important and I actually forgot to note that so I'm gonna try to remember that do you have post or bucket or something because you said you parse these things and post them or what have you published them do you have like a mechanism that you write to that will only trigger after you pass away so you write blog posts and you publish and they get published right away do you have a say a blog that you are writing to that isn't intended to be published publicly until the time of your death I have not done that I tried but even the email so the the email list has an auto responder to it so that if anyone person posts to the email list I have an auto response like hey remember where everything is have you checked to be sure that this isn't misfiring in some way but writing that was incredibly awkward it was just like hey guys maybe I'm dead and like I I really think it's like that's a really weird thing to write and so I need to go over that a few more times and help in it would be great so I haven't even made it to a blog post I really like that moment in a lot of short stories and films where someone gets to record that video if you're hearing this I'm already dead I actually think that's a lot of fun you just imagine you're that guy or gal or robot but one thing that I do is I just I write drafts I so I have a collection of drafts in my blog post that I'm never going to publish but I often finish the drafts and they're interesting and then I realize maybe I should maybe I should wait I've never explicitly done it thinking that it was going to be read after I was gone but all of that is in my mind the same as stuff that showed up in my personal notebooks so I do hope that it's eventually visible and it would be interesting to just for me it would be interesting to make a list of all the places that have those kinds of personal notes since this conference is about future technologies and humans one topic would be if we were able to let's say some people they have themselves frozen and after they're gone and some people might in the future have their their mind sort of recorded as a digital hard drive or something would would you choose to have that replayed when you passed physically or is that like another thing that would be more of a I mean it's a social question more than a topic I guess maybe everyone can kind of think of that in the sense of would you want your digital image to be replayed so I'll reframe this based on current technology of should people have access to my metadata after I'm dead is that inappropriate restatement okay resay your things that I'm sure I get it okay say if EEG scans or MRI scans were able to make a picture of yourself when you associate as I or you consider your thought process is able to be recorded and when you passed would you want that to be played sort of so your sense of either has been recorded could actually maybe have a few thoughts talk to a few people do its thing so do I would I consent to being uploaded for the use of people even if it's not for going the question of if it's actually me okay sure like that seems interesting I'm sure if it didn't work out for people to shut it back down and then there would be a lot of debates about whether it was okay to shut that thing down too but that's fine to be a guinea pig for sure is there any part of your data you would donate like you would donate an organ as an organ donor have you can even considered that is anything I would open source so one of the one of the outstanding questions is that there doesn't seem to be a place to store a repository of metadata and other data so wanting to shut down accounts but not knowing where to put that information I don't have an answer to that would I donate it yeah definitely yeah but I mean with the consent of the people that it was linked to one of the things that people compare this to was it's like if you just the analog version of breaking up with someone and Facebook consistently being like hey do you remember this it's like someone walking around and like passing pictures under your door like you remember that really tender moment hey like driving along someone dressed up like your ex like why does this happen all the time and so we see this happening in with with death also on social networks and so is there a way to make use of that data in a way that is kind to people who don't want to deal with it or aren't ready to I don't have an answer so I guess we're we're having this discussion because we are assuming that the way in which we die now is different than the way in which people died 50 years ago and that so that's that's something that we are on the same page about okay so yes it's not so much that the way we die is different it's the way that we've accumulated documentation and data so let me let me elaborate on what I said earlier my father died two years ago and I had to gather documents because no nobody expected him to die he didn't leave a will he was just he went he went to retire in the Philippines and was like you know doing his thing and in doing so he met a 25 year old girl and got her pregnant and left me with a half sister I needed to consider in terms of the how to divide our estate and what was I gonna do I didn't want to leave this this this part of my father high and dry and I wanted to respect I assumed that he loved her enough to leave or something so I had to figure out what am I gonna what am I gonna split up with her and the only real things I could I could give her were because at the time I wasn't gainfully employed so I can't really do anything so what did my father leave I had to hunt down his pension fund I had to hunt down his Social Security benefits I had to hunt down several things and land ownership of the house that they that they were living at at the time and unfortunately there wasn't there were no easy answers to any of those questions because as I was I literally drove across northern Lausanne in order to find all these answers because at the time my father was born he was born in Baguio which is a city on top of the mountain and six months later that city was was completely raised by the Japanese during World War two so I couldn't prove that he was born in the Philippines and I couldn't entitle my my sister to those benefits okay so then I went to the State Department the State Embassy to to try and transfer Social Security benefits to her and I couldn't but because of the language in the application forms I couldn't prove that she and I were related and were sisters so we had to go through another like four month waiting period for me to submit a DNA sample to make to make that argument and even still that was highly scrutinized by the bureaucrats there so what ended up happening oh and the as for as for land ownership there was no written agreement when my father built that house between the the proper land owner and him when he built that house so we couldn't even transfer the house to her we had to literally dismantle this house and sell it brick by brick so that we could give her something to live on so having all of having all of this information be completely absent and not and not planned for was incredibly problematic and I it took me about a year and a half for me to to feel secure that she was taken well care of and I did not have a paperwork problem for the rest of my life do you said that you help people do estate planning how have you done this over enough time that you've seen how things change in digital space with digital artifacts so the short answer is that it's a it's in many ways a new problem and it's a problem that as a profession we're just starting to talk about because things like people having their bank statements only exist in electronic form is new it's very new especially because banking is one of the last industries to go digital so in response to the question about whether we die differently than we did 50 years ago yeah we do or put differently now everybody dies with some portion of their really important stuff buried out in the woods somewhere at a coordinate that only they know and if you haven't left that coordinate with anybody it's going to take you know a chance expedition into the forest with a shovel to determine whether anybody finds your stuff or not thank you right and and your comment actually exemplifies something that I think a lot of people don't realize until they have the unfortunate opportunity to learn that the fact that something is true does not necessarily mean that you can prove that fact to a skeptical bureaucrat so I'm gonna I'm gonna add one last statement and then I'm gonna ask you all to add in final statements while I go around and do the the facilitation thing so I'm sad I won't get it but I'll watch the live stream later I promise only it won't be a live stream anymore haha um yes dead stream um so one one of the things that I in in writing about these things is that it that technology that allows us to be as ad hoc in planning as we are now where we can already be out the door before we figure out what restaurant we're going to and notify the person that's already headed to that neighborhood what restaurant we're meeting them at also makes it even more strange to plan for something like death because it takes so much for planning so much foresight in how to set things up and I also think that well in my experience geeks are especially prone to I planned out what this looks like now I don't have to actually execute it like oh I've solved the problem now I don't have to actually like fill out the form and submit it and mail it and whatever else and so one of the things that I would I'm hoping that people in this group are inspired to do is one to contribute to the wiki but also to actually deliver on whatever setup they decide upon even if they do it in private cool also I've been working on the spam accounts for the wiki so if you register but it doesn't work out email me we're getting better and better questions but sometimes it doesn't work okay so final comments I'm so sorry to run away while I do this yeah I think that there are lots of people who have internet presences on their own domains and domains cost money and I'm really interested in like how will you financially plan for like having that domain be yours for like eternity or like does that matter at all is it fine if it's just archived in some other way that doesn't require that like should part of your death planning also be like here is a small fund for buying my domain over and over again I don't know but I think about that a lot or there should be some United Nations run site called death.com slash your social security number in the country and then it has the archive of all the stuff you've ever created and therefore you have a graveyard for your digital data that lives on forever. There is a I learned that you had in order to report a death overseas of an American citizen there is a there's a registry for that and I had to I had to submit for for my dad's death and that and for them to deliver a physical certificate for me to bring back to the State Department took another month. I just want to put a plug in here geeks should love estate planning you know why because you get to write code for your death I mean seriously you want to set aside a fund for your executor to buy your domain and maintain a memorial site in perpetuity you can do that okay you want to choose which laws apply to your death and which ones don't you can do that okay you can do this at almost arbitrary levels of abstraction and if you haven't looked at this it's really cool is there a repository of such code that we can fork well could that could but could that repository of code be the wiki of like here are the rules that I decided to execute in my death and so and here's why and so anybody can re-appropriate different parts of it that would actually be really cool if there was some some equivalent to creative commons for estate planning something where you could assemble pre-made elements I think that would be really cool maybe somebody can do that it'd be really nice if this was a service that was made in such a way that it wasn't a startup and wasn't like the thing is if somebody makes this into a service you pay like $30 or like $30 a month until your death to like have the service available as insurance that service in and of itself as a startup will probably be alive for three years and won't be alive until your death it's like trying to get somebody set up with like this cryogenic freezing it's like okay I'm gonna pay prepay for 500 years of cryogenic freezing really really you can refrigerate somebody for that long with global warming you really think that that that energy is going to be diverted for that purpose which is why I set up mine in a way that my social group are the people that are entrusted with delivering on things we had talked about doing this as a service I don't know if Sam still thinks it's a good idea but I wanted it to just be like because then it's an allocation of trust and it's how long are they gonna be around and whatever else and so I wanted it to be a distributed social group there might be it might be possible to do it without being a service that somebody else does but just resources that other people could take and adapt on their own templates things like that yes there are lawyers who love this idea of upgrading templates for boilerplate or customizable boilerplate and I think I think there are groups putting things like this online now there's even a subset of github that's thinking about hosting code hubs but if github doesn't do it there are a bunch of lawyers trying to try to do these things so I think that a start is if you've created some really cool estate plans and you'd like to share them just post them online and ping some of these groups and they'll start to be mirrored the other thing I wanted to say was yes we were talking about setting up some kind of service my inclination is to find a domain provider that's willing to sell a domain instead of renting it so you can get you can get access to the domain and perpetuity and then set up whatever subdomains you want on that and I think that there is a lot of interest it would be fun if one of the things we could do is describe services we want that last hundreds of years of course they need some different infrastructure than what we currently have but we can we can make it happen a really interesting way to get a domain name and perpetuity is to ask somebody who runs a TLD so there's a guy in Portland that runs the dot wiki TLD and I wonder if he'd be willing to in my list we should ask him yes let's ask Ray if he can sell domain like dot like networked mortality dot wiki forever I don't even know what that means what is it means he's promising to keep the name servers running that that's that's really the service that you are paying for by renting a domain is that is the name server a physical box or virtual box that is responding to request to turn your name into an IP address that shouldn't be that difficult than to buy a lifetime the issue is when Ray dies who's going to take that over well can you buy you can't buy a lifetime of electricity can you for that box probably not unless you buy a mine so I mean that's my basic point is that domain names depend on name servers which depend on electricity so if you find lifetime if you figure out how to do lifetime electricity now we're talking you can also you can also acquire the name coin redirect to whatever domain name you pick so now you have multiple routes into the same this is good thank goodness there's an indie webcam coming up where we can build all this so everybody needs to be okay with the idea of death because it's certain mostly entirely certain with some exceptions and when I talked to my parents about this sort of thing they freak out so I want to get to the point where I can talk with them reasonably about it or I can't list them on a thing like my grandmother and grandfather died neither of them had a will my mom had to go through probate for a year and then got better at it and did the next one in six months but so I went to a law office at after school as my after-school daycare was lawyers because they were going through this thing and it was really complicated and I was like wow I really want to make a will now so may one was like 14 and I haven't revisited it so apparently all my stuffed animals are still going to some person I had a crush on yeah I I was just gonna say this is good timing because a few days ago I discovered this YouTube channel ask a mortician and I actually really recommended if you haven't checked it out checked it out yet it's a woman who is a mortician and she talks about all kinds of things relating to death and has a lot of interesting ideas about death in the modern world if you'd like to I have two book recommendations one is Mary Roche's stiff which talks about alternate ways in which we deal with cadavers as a society and also alternative burial burial methods one of which really appealed to me because when you learn about what what embalming does and and what that actually what happens to your body when you bury it and you and how that impacts the environment it makes it makes the burial of the the commercial burial process less appealing stiff by Mary Roche the other I can't remember the name of the other book but I will I probably will after this this thing so here you go let it be known if anyone after I die would sell my private information to marketers they're getting post-mortem DDoS haunting if somebody wants to sell my information after death to marketers and it funds my family then I don't see why that would be an issue but that's a personal choice if it can help my immediate family I think if you want to play around with the idea of a dead man switch before you actually die and just test out how that would work I think kites string.io is a service that you might even be able to grab on github that's more designed for like you're going out for the night and maybe you don't make it home or you're going out for a hike and don't make it back so that's like a concept that you want to play around with I think it's kites string.io and I think the code is on github if you want to tweak it. Okay I don't have anything directly to say about this but I just wanted to bring out like a tangent topic of discussion is now that we can record ourselves so well is it like somewhat unethical to continue to live after we die continue to live after we die in the digital world is it somewhat unethical? Well I don't think vampires are unethical so I'm gonna say no. No great topic thank you. I cede my time to the woman on my right. So I just got I got married recently and we still haven't even talked about any of this and so the whole point about all of this being hard to talk about and I'm just glad that this is being part of the discussion. So I kind of like the idea of the service mainly because like it's a privileged check right like you don't have to know about encryption or be able to build these services or have a computer or own a name server so that's just something to put out there I think libraries would be kind of a fantastic place to host some of this information. I'm really interested in the approach of like sharing your passwords or access and all that among your social circle for maintaining that and who is it? I think Willow you mentioned that like sharing social sharing your recovery information with social your social circle. I'm interested in understanding that approach and I'm particularly interested in how do you transition that set over time as the inevitable social transitions occur things like separations and divorces and stuff like that. So I set it up on a Google group because it was easy which is saying something I might fix it later is that the documentation is malleable like what is on this what is in the password vault is malleable who is on the list is malleable like they either are removed or added and there's always a notification to them about it but the list itself does not like that's the concrete part we can talk about it more later. I would just say that I think it's very good to talk about this stuff and I think that as a society we don't talk about death nearly enough and we don't plan for it. I think it's this is awesome it's hard to get right and we should have some kind of meme for testing out your death little sample death day see if all the things work. They have terrible security on their site actually so the people that both provide insurance for to take care of your pets after you're taken away at the rapture and the notification of rapture some of my friends did pen testing on their sites for for kicks and they're terrible it's amazing. Anyway thank you all so much for your time and we'll talk to you more later. Thanks Willow.