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What Happens To Your Data When You Die?
dacarr writes "Your data - that is, the personal web pages and projects you have worked on to make the 'net a better place - are presumably password protected. But sooner or later the time will come when you take that last breath, and with you goes your passwords, but not your data. It's still there for your benefactors to deal with. And while many famous people who are no longer with us (e.g., Douglas Adams or Chuck Jones) have a staff for this, well, many of us don't. As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
That said, I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files. Some of it is sentimental stuff like letters and writing. I imagine if someone decides it is worth publishing, it may live on significantly past my life time. Perhaps none of it will, but I'm not too worried about that, I'm happy that my "important data" lives on in the only place that matters, in the memories of my family and friends.
Basically, usefull and/or popular information has an indefinite life span because people will preserve, expand and share it. Call it the natural selection of information. We don't really need to do anything different to keep that going. Frankly, it's a good thing that useless and unimportant data dies, I'd hate to think that a future historian would be forced to search through petabytes of things like 100 year old Slashdot first-posts in order to find information about our recent war with Iraq.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
...why do I care? I'll be dead.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
I can't speak for Douglas Adams but Chuck Jones' entire enterprise is handled by his lovely daughter Linda who literally busts her butt to run everything. That's hardly a "staff". Chuck would have been content to never have drawn another cel or market anything but thank heavens Linda suggested it.
/.ers reading this should be concerned
with one thing: finding a porn erase buddy and give them a housekey and all of your passwords.
The idea is that if you die unexpectedly your porn erase buddy will go into your machine, clear your machine of all the pornographic files. In addition you can also have him/her to clear out your conventional
meatspace porn so your Momma will still highly of you even after you're gone.
Timothy Leary is another good example of dedicated fans who keep the site running after he died and an even better example is Peter McWilliams who put the entire text of all of his books online before he passed on. I recommend Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do. The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country.
Frankly as far as data and death are concerned most of you
This is exactly why you make a will. Passwords...how ever you store them...should be left to the people you wish to have said information. It's that simple
"our digital files will be treated the same way as your paper files after you die"
No, they won't be. I have a cousin who's been doing estate law for ~40 years and I've helped him on some extremely difficult cases where clients did not leave their passwords. You're personal affects and papers are accessible, unless you take positive steps you're digital affects probably won't be.
A lot of folks may not want next of kin going through their hard drives, but there probably is stuff on there that an heir or executor will -need-. Give secure storage of these things and continuity of access real thought please.
One can put all sorts of things into a Will for the executor to deal with.
Everyone over 18 should have one, not only does it protect what you own, you can reach out and exact revenge upon people after your death with a Will.
Someone always mean to you? Will them a Nickel as a fuck you. Someone who betrayed me is getting a "bright shiny quarter" from me because "that's all they are worth." Have a friend with questionable musical tastes? Will them some CDs. I've got a buddy who is getting my classic rock collection so he "listens to something else".
Have a beer, and dictate your will to someone, sign it and be protected. In many states if you kick without one, the State gets all your stuff.
Why aren't your passwords in your legally protected last will and testament? A trusted 3rd party can then divulge the passwords on your passing, along with all your other 'property'.
My father passed away due to a sudden heart attack in 2002. He hadn't prepared for something like this at all - he was in his mid 50s and in great shape. Outside of his main Mac desktop, i have no idea where his stuff is. His work machine was wiped when he was laid off about 6 months earlier (he worked in IT). I have tried to access any accounts of his that i knew of - ebay and paypal were the only important ones, the BBS accounts didn't matter so much - to see if there was anything that needed to be taken care of. But i didn't have his password, and the hint was "same as password." I still haven't been able to access either of those accounts, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some money in the PayPal - he was really into ebay.
he might have had some information stored on his Palm, but the battery died and everything was lost before i even thought to check it. That still irks me.
It is weird whenever i stumble upon an archived forum post made by him. It's like he's still alive, but nowhere near me physically. That's a little piece of his mind, words said and recorded. The same goes for his email. When I was making sure to tie up loose ends, i was reading mails he had sent and recieved just a few days earlier, when he was in seemingly perfect health.
Data, especially communication, is much like a photograph. Only instead of archiving some physical thing or event, it's a snapshot of someone's brain or personality.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Thank you for a reply relevent to what I wrote. In the case of papers most people use safe deposit boxes. That's the very best example of the contrast between paper and digital, your death certificate will get you somewhere with a bank deposit box. They have to give it to S.Heir/executor, sure there may be a day or two wait, but it's a legal guarantee. There is no legal guarantee of delivery with encrypted files.
For others replying here, why would you just assume that other people are so stupid that they don't know about boot disks? I mean, I know we're supposed to be arrogant because we're technical but isn't there -some- sort of limit to that? Most people (that I know) with estates who store private data on their FS' use encryption. Actually, not using encryption -would- be stupid IMHO and I assumed folks in a technical forum would be encrypting.
My father died suddenly about a year ago. He maintained 3 different web sites, one personal, one for a sailing club he belonged to, and one for his cousin's business. He was the sole contact for two of the registrar, plus there were web hosting passwords, ftp server passwords, isp account passwords, email account passwords. Luckily, my mother and I knew all his passwords and have been able to keep everything running. Security is important but it's not a bad idea to have someone else know how to get in to certain things just in case. Email is probably the most important thing because you can usually get people to change your password and email you the new one.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Use a master password and have at least one other person you trust implicitly, who knows it. "Security risk," blah blah. If you don't even have one person in the world who you can trust with your passwords while alive, then there really isn't anyone important enough to need your data when you're dead. I trust pacts more than passwords. Pacts can't be cracked.
Agreed.
Generally there are two types of depression, although you rarely get one without aspects of the other. They also tend to feed off of each other.
The first is clinical depression, which means that chemicals are screwed up in your brain and you need medication. I was on so many different meds over the years until we finally found one that worked.
The second is situational depression, which basically means your life sucks. This can be manifested through physical or emotional abuse or so many other factors. Mine was more situational than chemical, but that's all relative. The chemical aspect alone would have been enough to take me out of life.
I refer to mine as "clinical depression" even though it was more situational just because that forces people to realize that there is a medical aspect to it.
My saying is that "medication gets you stable, counseling gets you fixed." If the meds that you are on aren't working and haven't been for several weeks, SWITCH. Effexor is what finally did it for me, but everyone is different.
Once you get some semblance of stability back, you have to get professional counseling. As my high school girlfriend's mother put it, "it took years for you to get that way, it's going to take years for you to get out." It's true, and you can't do it alone. Get help so you can talk through what has happened to you and get yourself sorted out.
Take care of yourself my friend.
- Neil Wehneman
which a great deal of mine was, and I simply refer to
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Most posts discuss what happens to the data, and most mention porn, others mention software, ...etc.
...etc.). What about your emails that you meticulously kept for 10 or 15 years.
All that is good and all, but there is more than that. Think about your accounting records for example (Quicken, GnuCash,
That is the stuff on your computer. What about the stuff you put on the net in one form or another? For example that blog you setup? Or that web site?
Once you die, the PC eventually becomes obsolete or unusable. Chances are, your spouse of kids are not interested in what is the computer, and it is gone. Your web hosting account will probably be terminated due to non-payment.
Before archeology, our only sources of data on past civilizations was from historians. These were often porfessional people writing for posterity, and had some bias or other.
After archeology came into play in the 19th century, our knowledge of past civilization had a quantum leap, after we found fragments of daily life from average people (like you and me and him). Whether it was Greek ostraca, or baked clay tablets with list of goods, or pottery shards with writing practice in hieroglyphs.
Which brings me to the point of this post: the bigger picture, not individuals, or families, but societies and civilizations.
All this meta data about humanity in the last 2 decades of the 20th century, and the 21st century is on perishable and fragile media. It is even volatile (web hosting account?)
How would people several centuries from now view this entire civilization? How would they guage the reaction to say Sept 11, or invasion of Iraq? Would they see the US population as pro or anti war, or divided evenly? How would Bin Laden and Bush be assessed? Blair? Aznar? How would they get a glimpse into people's daily life.
Remember that as things are happening, it is easy to think that the information you gather on the event/person/concept are always clear and available. However, if you give it a decade or two, you yourself will not remember much details. How about people from a different culture/mindset/civilization/society? What would they think and how would they perceive you from the little they manage to recover?
The only hope here is the wayback machine at http://www.archive.org But will it endure? Is it enough?
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