Perry

Hewitt

Tag: death

  • On death and online culture

    On death and online culture

    As Facebook knows, a digital world raises new problems. To be sure, Facebook made a mistake not considering enough the mortality of those who would use their product. But to be fair, when have inventors or designers ever had to before? Think of other classic American brands—Ford or Coca-Cola, for example—whose products are not so intimately linked with their customers’ fates. Cokes and cars are disposable or easily transferable after death. But Facebook, whose product is your own identity, deals in an individualized item that’s nontransferable after death.

     

    — Alexander Landfair in the Missouri Review, discussing the emerging and problematic ways we acknowledge death through social media

  • Friday 5 — 07.26.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook’s Q2 numbers are in and the company appears to have mastered mobile ads — which now make up 41% of ad revenue.
    2. Google delivered Chromecast, a device that lets you watch the web on your TV for $35, and competes with the likes of Apple TV and Roku. Its approach is fundamentally different, though, using your smartphone as the interface for the TV experience.
    3. YouTube releases customizable subscribe buttons to allow users to follow channels from anywhere. It’s another way to promote the high-value content channels, channels you might develop a fondness for and watch on your TV screen via, say, Chromecast.
    4. Flipboard affirmed its position as both distributor and competitor to its content providers by launching a web-based version of the service. Publishers have used Flipboard to reach audiences on iPad, but may have questions about a web-based version that runs ads like their own sites.
    5. Visiting your parents this summer? Just how many times do you think you’ll see them before they die? This app offers up a best guess based on WHO health statistics — and provides great material for guilt-purveying mothers everywhere.

  • Emerging law for data inheritance

    More broadly, America’s Uniform Law Commission, a non-partisan group that creates model legislation that is then adopted unchanged by many American states, has a “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets” committee working on amendments to existing ULC laws that would give executors many of the same powers over digital assets that they have over financial and physical ones, while absolving service providers of any liability. These adjustments could be incorporated into some states’ laws as soon as 2015, though some federal fiddles may be required as well. In her paper, Ms Perrone notes that such uniformity would mean that “people would no longer have to rely on companies’ varying terms of use to determine how to manage digital assets.” When dealing with death, a little certainty can be a great comfort.

     

    – The Economist reports on “Who owns your data when you’re dead.” Good summary of a recent paper and legal progress on how to distribute data post-mortem in a world with a couple thousand years of familiarity with the concept of physical asset inheritance.

  • Digital afterlife data policy

    Beyond the variability among states and companies, it’s worth asking if access to data post-mortem should extend beyond family members and enter some kind of publicly accessible data repository, which data scientists and presumably anyone else could explore. In presenting this concept, Brubaker used the word “donate,” not unlike a person permitting organ donations after death.

    – Jordan Novet, Dealing with data after death ain’t easy. Here’s why.

  • Digital afterlife

    Who gets the photographs and the e-mail stored online, the contents of a Facebook account, or that digital sword won in an online game?…“There can be painful legal and emotional issues for relatives unless you decide how to handle your electronic possessions in your estate planning.”

    — Anne Eisenberg in yet another useful piece on practical estate planning for digital assets post-mortem. As we all accumulate more and more curated digital assets like blogs, social accounts, and photos, how do we pass them along?

  • Prepare for your digital afterlife

    inactive account screenshot100% of the people who read this post will die. As will 100% of the people who have accounts with Google. And Google’s finally doing something about it with the launch of Inactive Account Manager, an awkwardly-named but sensible service for deciding what to do with your digital legacy. I’ve written about death in the social era before and the need for social web services to develop new protocols for the decease; as personal online data accumulates, the need is ever greater.

    Google has created a straightforward step-by-step process: select what “inactive” should mean for your account; verify your mobile phone number; and select the data (email, contacts, photos, etc.) you’d like to share with a designated recipient; or, delete your account entirely.

    I did pause at the hardest screen of all: a blank email to complete to your digital heir. We don’t often take the time to consider or have the opportunity to craft our last words in pixels. What subject line is appropriate from the afterlife? What’s the optimal email length from a deceased sender? Save some time for this; that email message was short, but took far longer to write than I ever imagined.