Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death
Adam Ostrow, Adele McAlear, Bill LeFurgy, Evan Carroll
Sunday, March 11 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Austin Convention Center Room 9ABC

Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity
Ben Goertzel, Bruce Duncan, David Hanson, John Romano
Monday, March 12 3:30PM – 4:30PM
Driskill Hotel Citadel

“There is no doubt that the smartphone is becoming ‘good enough’ much of the time; but thanks to mobile phones, more pictures are being taken than ever before,” said Liz Cutting, executive director and senior imaging analyst at NPD.  “Consumers who use their mobile phones to take pictures and video were more likely to do so instead of their camera when capturing spontaneous moments, but for important events, single purpose cameras or camcorders are still largely the device of choice.”

As individuals capture more of life’s moments in digital form, they’re creating larger and richer digital collections. This trend underscores the importance of planning for your digital afterlife.

Photo by Johnathan Lyman

Death used to be the final disconnect from the mortal world, but that’s not quite the case anymore. From the paranormal to the touching, tales abound about technology beyond the grave. Perhaps more telling is what these stories tell us about our changing culture.

John Jacobs, 55, passed away in 2005 following a battle with pancreatic cancer, but he’s not quite out of touch with his family. The New York Post reported in 2008 that Jacobs’ wife continued to pay the 55-dollar Verizon bill keeping his mobile phone service alive and well, with no plans to shut it off.

“As long as someone is still out there who cares, I still care. My kids still care. His friends still care,” Jacobs says. “I don’t think I’ll ever shut it off.”

In an added twist, Jacobs was buried with his cell phone fully charged. Mourners were startled when the first post-mortem call arrived during the burial service. Jacob’s wife, Marian Seltzer, even had Jacobs’ headstone engraved with his phone number. Family and friends continue to leave voice messages for Jacobs, taking comfort in this facsimile of his presence.

Jacobs’ isn’t the only post-mortem account that Verizon managed. Fox News reported about Charles Whlting of Irvington, NY, who kept his wife’s voicemail active since 2005. Whlting, 80, kept the account active so that he could listen to Catherine Whlting’s voice on the outgoing message. In 2008, a change in the voicemail system brought this story to light, as Whlting thought the recording was lost. Whlting blamed Verizon saying, “Now they took her voice away.” Luckily a Verizon contractor was able to locate an archived copy of the recording and restored Catherine Whlting’s voice to the system.

For a dose of the paranormal, a UK-man believes that he’s receiving text messages from his deceased wife, who, like Jacobs, was buried with her mobile telephone.

“She always had a mobile with her,” Jacobs told The Register. ” We buried her with her phone. There have been messages with words Sadie would say but there’s no number.”

Paranormal events aside, Perhaps Seltzer and Whlting were ahead of their time. Products and online services now abound offering new ways to remember loved ones through technology. Traditional monument manufacturer Quiring Monuments launched its Living Headstone product in March. Free for new headstones and 65 dollars for existing ones, customers receive a QR code to place on the headstone and a five-year subscription to a personal Web page, complete with photos and writings in memory of the deceased. An administrator, presumably a family member, manages the Web page. Cemetery visitors with smartphones can read the QR code and visit a memorial Web page to learn more about the deceased.

Another company, Rosetta Stone (not to be confused with the foreign language software), offers NFC-enabled microchips for headstones. Similar to Quiring, Rosetta Stone directs cemetery visitors with NFC-enabled smartphones to a memorial Web page.

While the exact numbers are open for debate, many sources, including The Washington Post, report that the average lifespan of a Web page is 44-75 days. Pages owned by corporations are likely more durable, but the Web is fleeting. The challenge for any of these memorial Web pages or voicemail accounts is a digital death, when they are no longer accessible.

The founders of 1000Memories, a San Francisco-based startup currently backed by 2.52 Million in funding, want to make ensure the permanence of online memorials. The service allows users to create “memory pages” for loved ones. Unlike other memorial website companies, 1000Memories has partnered with the Internet Archive to ensure accurate inclusion of its pages in the Wayback Machine. The company also published an overview of its safeguards to ensure the permanence of memory pages.

Considering the rise of specialty websites like 1000Memories and new memorial products, we’re clearly in the middle of a culture shift. Technology, once considered irreverent, is now a welcome component of the grieving process. Perhaps further evidence of this is the deluge of online services offering to help individuals secure their digital legacies by leaving a list of user names and passwords or writing emails for their heirs. A significant part of today’s culture, social networking sites also offer memorial services. Facebook, for example, allows survivors to convert profiles into a memorialized state and Twitter offers families archives of their loved ones’ public tweets.

As we continue to shift toward a completely digital culture, it’s certain that technology will play a greater role in memorials. As Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Diary: “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” Perhaps our digital memorials will fulfill that goal.

The app gives individuals, families and organizations the ability to scan and instantly share large collections of photos and documents that have previously been difficult to digitize – the photos traditionally neglected in shoeboxes, old family albums or archived analog collections.

We connected with founder Jonathan Good via Skype to talk about Shoebox. Unfortunately Jonathan’s video froze just after the recording began.

“Large photo collections from our past have never been digitized or shared because it’s been too difficult and time-consuming. With the introduction of the Shoebox app, we’re putting multiple hand-held scanners in households and organizations, for free,” says 1000memories co-founder Rudy Adler. “We’ve created a tool  that allows people to upload and share old photos in a fraction of the time needed for traditional photo scanning, which will dramatically change the rate at which these collections are being shared.”

Using the latest technology, Shoebox can auto-detect the edges of a photo and then quickly crop and straighten accordingly. Users can then add information typically written on the back of old photos – such as dates, names, and locations – before uploading to the 1000memories.com, where it can be organized, shared and discovered by friends and family.

1000memories hopes to help users get their older collections of photos online and in order while their friends, families and communities still remember the stories and people behind them.  “The captions, dates and tags are just as important as the photos themselves – it’s imperative that we get as many of these photo collections online as possible while we can still access the stories behind them,” says Adler.

The launch of Shoebox comes on the heels of the release of the iPhone 4S, and will take advantage of its significant upgrades in mobile camera technology, including an 8.0 MP sensor for high-resolution mobile scans, as well as an improved f2.4 lens, for quality lower-light scans.  The app will remain compatible with all previous iPhone models, including the iPhone 4, 3G, and 3GS, as well as the iPad.

“The popularity of the iPhone camera has proven that people want something that’s quick, accessible, and easy to share,” says Adler.  “For us, that’s what providing a social mobile scanner is about – making it as easy as possible for people to get their photo collections digitized and shared with the people they care about.”

Here’s the commercial prepared by the 1000memories team.

In addition to the new name and look of the service, SecureSafe also includes some notable enhancements such as: accessibility to the file safe not only from a browser but also via the iPhone or iPad app; a SecureViewer™ that provides guaranteed security when viewing documents on a PC; and additional security based on Apple’s recently launched iOS5 platform. DataInherit remains as a feature of the new service guaranteeing users long-term storage and preservation of their data.

“Over the last year we have expanded our footprint to include banking institutions as our services provide an innovative extension to existing e-banking offerings. With the new name SecureSafe we underline the fact that our Internet data safe is the digital safe deposit box of the future providing an electronic version of the traditional bank vault,” explains Christian Schwarzer, CEO of DSwiss.

With SecureSafe, customers can still choose from a variety of account options to suit their particular needs such as the entry level ‘SecureSafe FREE’ up to the premium option, ‘SecureSafe GOLD’. The enhanced usability and features ensure that there is a package to suit every level of user with an underlying assurance of maximum security which is what DSwiss has become renowned for.

On the other side of things, we continually praise digital estate planning services that 1. make it easier for users to complete the process and 2. offer value during life and not just after death. In that spirit, here’s an idea to make planning a bit easier.

If you’re comfortable with saving your passwords in your Web browser, you can use various utilities to export the list of passwords to a spreadsheet. You can use that as a basis for your digital asset inventory or you might be able to upload the list to a digital estate planning service of your choice. You’ll still need to express your wishes for each account and make sure that your executor is notified about the inventory, but this will help you get started.

What you should do:

1. As you use the Web, save your passwords. Many Web browsers offer a simple way to do so. Here’s an example of the message you’ll see in Firefox.

Remember password dialog in Firefox

2. After about a week of saving passwords you’ll probably have a list of the online accounts you use most frequently. You can preview the list in Firefox by clicking Preferences > Security > Saved Passwords (or Options > Security if you use Windows). You’ll want to check and make sure you have your important accounts listed.

3. Export your passwords. In Firefox you can use the Password Exporter add-on to create a CSV file of your passwords. This file can be opened in almost every spreadsheet application, like Excel.

4. Copy this information into your digital asset inventory (we have templates: Excel, Google Docs) or you can look into importing the information into your digital estate planning service. If you use DataInherit, they have instructions for doing so here.

5. Include your wishes in your inventory or in your digital estate planning service. Repeat this process from time to time to capture new accounts or those you use less frequently.

If you a browser other than Firefox, here’s how you can find your passwords:

Safari or Chrome for Mac: Go to the Applications folder > Utilities and open Keychain Access. Choose Passwords to see a list of saved passwords from your browser.

Chrome for Windows: Go to the Tools menu > Options > Minor Tweaks tab. In the Passwords section, click the Show saved passwords button.

Internet Explorer for Windows: In Internet Explorer, there are no free or built in password recovery features. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but there is Passcape Internet Explorer Password Recovery.

Earlier this week Dead Man’s Switch released a beta version. In an email to users founder Stavros Korokithakis announced the beta and hinted at new features to come.

The new version only contains about the same functionality as the old one, for now, but we would appreciate your help in testing it. We have planned for it a multitude of features, such as configurable intervals, file attachments, different ways of checkin, etc, but we need your help to make sure that everything is working properly.

We can only speculate that the underlying code received a rewrite to serve as a foundation for new features to come.

DataInherit Password Import For Firefox

The folks over at DataInherit tweeted about a quick and easy way to get started with their service by exporting saved passwords from Firefox. It’s a great way to get started, but also a great opportunity to remember those accounts that you may have forgotten about. Detailed instructions are available on their website.

World Without Me

World Without Me is a new digital estate planning and posthumous email service that’s in closed beta right now. Based in India, the service offers “Dispatches” as emails scheduled for the future (not just at death) and a “Vault” for storing usernames and passwords. More interesting is the “Footprint” component, which is an aggregation and archive service for social media:

It’s your Journal that treasures everything you did and thought about. Archive you digital footprint to create your autobiography on the go. Aggregate everything digital of significance (Facebook status updates, Tweets, Emails, and Documents) and share it with only the ones that matter.

Our email boxes are full of messages from new digital afterlife services. We’ll be adding those to our growing Digital Death and Afterlife Online Services List soon. If you have any industry news to share, feel free to drop us a line.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this. A company called Rosetta Stone (not the foreign language software) is offering QR code and NFC (near field communication, a technology based upon RFID) products for addition to headstones. The products from Rosetta Stone allow users to view a similar online memorial.

I have to ask, will the websites for these QR codes be around in 20 years time? The Web today is just 20 years old, and we don’t have much of the original Web left. While the technology has promise, I’d like to hear more about the preservation efforts for the digital half of the memorial.

What do you think? Do you want a QR code on your headstone?

• John Romano, The Digital Beyond
• Bill LeFurgy, Library of Congress
• Adam Ostrow, Mashable
• Adele McAlear, DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com and Edelman Digital

We need your help getting through the Panel Picker. If you have a few spare moments visit our listing and give us a vote.

Introducing the panelists:

The official description:

When you kick the bucket, you’ll leave behind a vast amount of digital information: a lifetime’s worth of Tweets, emails, blogs, photos, videos and more. They’re the product of a creative life well lived.

In fact, this information forms a rich archive of who we are and what we think. But in a world of passing technology, will our digital selves simply fade away as the victim of neglect? Or will they live on in perpetuity like the Great Pyramids to be remembered and celebrated?

Libraries frequently preserve the collections of the significant and famous, but what about the rest of us? Does technology hold the key to widespread digital preservation? Or should we just die and be dead?

As we think about the future of experiencing the past, how should we prepare? What technology will we need? And what will that mean for society? Join our group of archivists, technologists and interaction designers who are going to discuss the challenges and opportunities of a digitally preserved world.