andrewducker

I've seen this going around today and been mildly unimpressed, even annoyed, and hasn't worked out why until now.

Increasingly, a problem for heirs and executors is getting access to stuff that's only available online - while hopefully the deceased's mail client will stay logged on, there's still plenty of things that are only accessible by either password escrow (if that was part of the will process - unlikely these days) or by asking for an email-based password reset.

And how do you know which websites are important (banks might be obvious, but you want to inform online communities etc. that you might not know the deceased was part of)? Browser history.

I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously. I certainly didn't mean it that way.

Yeah, but it still rubbed me up the wrong way.

Yeah, I was thinking of the other half of this, that I might want a way to automatically allow someone trusted access to various accounts. It wouldn't even need to be a dead-man's handle, it could, say, let you designate one or two friends who should be able to read and send (probably with a non-optional disclaimer "sent on behalf of!") in an emergency: say, they click a button to enable the option, and it sends you a warning and goes through automatically if you don't cancel it in a day.

In fact, you could do it entirely offline, put the passwords in a piggy bank you have to smash to open it. Then anyone you trust in your house COULD open it, but not just succumb to the temptation to "just peek" and hope you don't know.

(There's the technical problem that email lets you access many other accounts unencumbered, but there may be some way round it.)

And if you trust them implicitly:
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138350

My previous deadman's switch provider died itself. :-)

Banks are generally not only available online. Even if they are they know that people die and they have procedures for what to do when the executor phones them up and says "Mary Smith died". You do not need my ebanking log on to tell the bank I died and deal with my estate.

The rest of my internet stuff is utterly irrelevant to my executors. Just because I asked you to sort out sending my money to my charity-of-choice doesn't mean I want you to be reading my email/private LJ entries/etc.

Sort of like the military removing porn before letting the widow have stuff?

There's an app for that!

A huge panoply of such things, ranging from keeping stuff out of browser history in the first place (pr0n 'private browsing' mode), to plugins or scripts that delete history when you shut down the browser, to applications that'll clean things up if you don't defer them in time. And doubtless things I haven't thought of.

I believe the traditional hacker's way of doing the dead-man's-handle trick is to write yourself two long-dated cron jobs: one cleans everything up, the other regularly prompts you (in an obfuscated only-you-understand way) to shift the cleaner job back in time before it deletes stuff you might want.

To be honest, I'll be dead by then, so I'm not too worried if people come across a bookmark folder marked "Tentacles and Eels". If I was into anything seriously worrying then I'd probably set up encrypted volumes to handle it.

Indeed. As a latent social consideration, I'd prefer my executors didn't have to deal with my Eels, so I (try to) make sure those are all tidied away anyway.

Hmmm can I get one that says 'burn everything in the bedside cabinet'?