Death and the Digital Estate

Digital assets live long after we do

Credit: Titmouse Inc/AMC

Nobody asks to be handed a new online account. We use them because we have to – but in certain life circumstances we have to pay extra-close attention to their existence, their protection, and how they work. The most dramatic and distressing of those circumstances is when a family member passes away.

With people’s lives so firmly wrapped up in the connected world, each of us has a sizable digital estate in addition to physical and financial assets. In fact, many of the latter are now exclusively accessed with the former! These online artifacts can get caught up in the death of their owner, causing anguish for family members who need to access bank accounts and share news with social connections, in the middle of many other trying tasks.

With people’s lives so firmly wrapped up in the connected world, each of us has a sizable digital estate in addition to physical and financial assets. In fact, many of the latter are now exclusively accessed with the former! These online artifacts can get caught up in the death of their owner, causing anguish for family members who need to access bank accounts and share news with social connections, in the middle of many other trying tasks.

A LinkedIn announcement sadly seen all too often. Credit: Dean Saxe

With people’s lives so firmly wrapped up in the connected world, each of us has a sizable digital estate in addition to physical and financial assets. In fact, many of the latter are now exclusively accessed with the former! These online artifacts can get caught up in the death of their owner, causing anguish for family members who need to access bank accounts and share news with social connections, in the middle of many other trying tasks.

Last year, with the maturing of passkeys, digital identity technologists started acknowledging the breakthrough progress made in authentication. The identity field has also seen the passing of distinguished contributors like Kim Cameron and Vittorio Bertocci (who have been beautifully memorialized through the new Digital Identity Advancement Foundation). In response, our community cast a wider net to focus on problems that were harder still. So it seems like the right time to talk about these tougher topics.

To spur real progress, Dean Saxe – a great technologist as well as a great humanist – has spearheaded the launch of a new group at the OpenID Foundation called Death and the Digital Estate (DADE). This group will collect scenarios that tie into the complexities of identity relationships. As I mentioned in a recent video, managing identity goes beyond the individual and extends to family and many other people in the real world. This topic has been a passion of mine for over a decade as I worked on User-Managed Access (UMA) – particularly regarding healthcare, underage users, and elderly users, where the scenarios share many features with DADE.

One of the many subtleties of a new-age discussion about digital assets is that it’s becoming easy for a surviving family member to make chatbots representing people who have died. (This research on the ethics of “deathbots” was published at about the same time as the animated series Pantheon, which imagined a whole new dangerous world of “uploaded intelligences”.)

I’m pleased to be a contributor to this new group! If the topic interests you as well, be sure to join the mailing list to follow along.