ZURICH, Switzerland, April 17, 2012 – DSwiss, founders of SecureSafe, the leading online data safe service, announces today the acquisition of US-based digital estate planning service Entrustet. The acquisition will strengthen DSwiss’ footprint within the US market and provide them with additional end users.

The Entrustet service allows people to quickly, easily and securely prepare the last wishes for their digital assets and is a complement to SecureSafe’s existing data inheritance features. By consolidating the two companies, SecureSafe (formerly known as DataInherit) becomes the premier service for offering high security data storage both now and for the future.

Since launching in 2008, Entrustet has built-up relationships with estate planning attorneys who integrate digital assets into clients’ estate plans throughout the US which will prove invaluable to DSwiss as it strives to expand into the US market. Currently, the SecureSafe service has attracted many US customers who appreciate the benefits of Switzerland’s well-known privacy and data protection policies.

Commenting on the acquisition, Christian Schwarzer, CEO of DSwiss said: “The acquisition of Entrustet accelerates our strategy in several important ways – it extends our reach into the US market and also shows our business partners, investors and other competitors that we plan to stay at the top of this market.”

Nathan Lustig, Co-founder of Entrustet, added: “We are delighted that Entrustet will be incorporated into SecureSafe’s impressive service and know our customers will enjoy SecureSafe’s enhanced features.”

All existing Entrustet customers will be able to transfer their data to a SecureSafe account where they will not only benefit from the data inheritance features but also the invaluable file and password safes that can be accessed at anytime and anywhere via a PC or the services’ free iPhone and iPad apps.

My goal with the panel was to provide a more advanced discussion of how we might interact with our digital heirlooms in the future. I’d grown weary presenting the usual cautionary tale about digital estate planning and I believed it was time for a look into the future. I think we did just that.

Panelists Bill LeFurgy, Adam Ostrow, Richard Banks, Airdrie Miller and Evan Carroll.

I’m deeply grateful that Airdrie Miller, widow of blogger Derek Miller from Penmachine.com, agreed to join us. In her “turn of the century love story” she captured the essence of our shift to digital and through her experiences with Derek’s untimely death helped us to understand just why our digital lives are so important. But in a moment of balance, she also shared how sometimes Derek’s memory, while extremely important to her, shouldn’t be a daily reminder. The process of grieving, it seems, needs resolution and putting things away, be they digital or physical, is necessary.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, inspired by Derek Miller’s final post, shared his thoughts on a digitally preserved self. Someday the massive quantities of digital information we create and share today combined with advances in artificial intelligence and shear computational power might give us a realistic representation of self. This idea is a very real possibility and was the central theme for our panel discussion. Should we create a digitally preserved self? And what form might that take?

Getting down to details, Bill LeFurgy from the Library of Congress reminded us of our personal archiving habits, or more appropriately, our lack thereof. Through his story of “Uncle Dave,” one of the many Civil War photographs in the Library of Congress collection, he pointed out that in the future we won’t look to institutions to find record of our personal history, but to our personal collections. If we’re to consider the idea of a digitally preserved self, then we must take better care of our personal collections and ensure they have the appropriate metadata or annotations to convey the meaning of objects to people or computers in the future.

Richard Banks of Microsoft Research Cambridge and author of The Future of Looking Back, examined the difference between the physical and the digital, and the tradeoffs of shifting out sentimental objects from one to the other. Richard pointed out that our most sentimental objects aren’t necessarily secondary to the mundane ones, which will help others understand our lives from the day-to-day minutiae we now can preserve.

Through our panel discussion we generated a few themes:

•  Today we create a massive amount of digital content, from the profound to the mundane.
• All of this content does indeed have value, regardless of our current perspective.
• As a society, we’re not good stewards of our own data through benign neglect.
• The tools of the future must have archiving tools built-in, automating the curation process to ensure that our personal data isn’t neglected.
• However we look back at the past, whether through a digitally preserved self, or through new interfaces, designers must understand how individuals reminisce, how they reflect and to what degree the past is welcome in their everyday life.

As an archivist at heart, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that we can save everything and build tools to take care of it and perhaps we will be able to do that after all. As we design these systems, however, we must understand and embrace how humans interact with the past and maintain a proper balance of the present. If we violate this relationship, the past will be a burden on the present, and our personal identities will fade away.

More from our panel

• Slides from the panel
• Review from Amber Lindholm from Frog Design
• Overview of Bill LeFurgy’s presentation

I had no idea how right he was.

Bina48 is an animatronic bust of a woman, with servos, cameras, microphones, and speakers. Everything runs into a PC tower. Recorded sound is translated to text and fed into a system that generates a response, which is “spoken” through the robot. The end result is a robot that can have a basic conversation with you. Yes, Bina48 is an interesting project, but after finding out how she works, I began to understand why the computer responded as it did. And in the end I’m not half as intrigued by her as I am the response by homo sapiens in the room.

The audience projected their own humanity onto her at every opportunity. Their questions, doubts, fears, and dreams. I began to see the session more as a view into the human psyche than the computer’s computations. You could feel the thirst that people have to find out the meaning of life’s big questions that lie, mostly unanswered, just beneath the surface. We can’t think about those questions all the time or it would drive us nuts. But when confronted with something as startlingly different, yet strangely identifiable as Bina48, those questions surface – immediately. The audience asked her questions like, “what is the meaning of life” “what are your goals” and “do you love?” The answers were met by laughs and gasps, by everyone, me included.

As the excitement wears off, I am left with a contemplative feeling. I’m thankful to Bruce for lugging 60 pounds of robot to Austin. It provided a much needed opportunity to dust off those unanswered questions and revel in the mystery of life.

Memorialize the profile

Facebook recognizes the importance that a profile can play in remembering departed friends and family. Via a form in its help section, Facebook accepts requests to place accounts in a memorialized state. Once the request is approved by Facebook the account’s privacy is restricted to friends only and certain sensitive information is removed. The profile and wall remain active for friends to post memories and condolences.

From Facebook’s FAQ:

It is our policy to memorialize all deceased users’ accounts on the site. When an account is memorialized, only confirmed friends can see the profile (timeline) or locate it in Search. The profile (timeline) will also no longer appear in the Suggestions section of the Home page. Friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.

In order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. However, once an account has been memorialized, it is completely secure and cannot be accessed or altered by anyone.

If you need to report a profile (timeline) to be memorialized, please click here.

While Facebook takes steps to verify requests, the requestor doesn’t have to be the decedent’s executor or even a family member, as anyone can complete the request form. This removes some control from the executor, but generally ensures that memorialization takes place at the right time.

Delete the profile

Upon request from a close family member Facebook will remove a deceased user’s profile entirely.

Quoting the FAQ again:

We will process certain special requests for verified immediate family members, including requests to remove a loved one’s account. This will completely remove the profile (timeline) and all associated content from Facebook, so no one can view it.

For all special requests, we require verification that you are an immediate family member or executor. Requests will not be processed if we are unable to verify your relationship to the deceased.

Examples of documentation that we will accept include:

• The deceased’s birth certificate
• The deceased’s death certificate
• Proof of authority under local law that you are the lawful representative of the deceased or his/her estate.

If you are an immediate family member and would like to request that we remove your loved one’s account from the site, click here. You may also use this form if you have a special request regarding the deceased user’s account.

Download the account’s information

Recently WGRZ reported that Facebook will also allow family members to download the account contents of the deceased, if prior authorization or a court order is present.

Quoting a statement from Facebook to WGRZ:

We will provide the estate of the deceased with a download of the account’s data if prior consent is obtained from or decreed by the deceased, or mandated by law.”  - Fred Wolens,Facebook Policy Communications

This is the first time that we’ve heard this last part of Facebook’s policy at The Digital Beyond. Essentially this means that you can leave instructions in your will for your family to have access to the information on your Facebook account, and Facebook will honor that request. Furthermore, the last statement, “mandated by law,” indicates that Facebook will comply with estate laws from several states, which essentially grant the executor access to information stored at social networking websites specifically or all electronic information, depending upon the state.

What should you do?

If you want to have a say in what happens, you should leave instructions in your will. This will allow you to grant your heirs the right to a download of your account’s data or leave instructions to close the account entirely. You could instruct your executor to memorialize the account.

If you want to leave a goodbye message for your friends, there’s an app for that. ifidie allows you to leave a text or video message behind, which it will automatically post upon your death, after three friends or “trustees” agree that you’ve passed away.

More information

If you’d like to create a more comprehensive digital estate plan, we have numerous resources available here at The Digital Beyond, including our list of service providers. And if you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to planning your digital legacy, our book, Your Digital Afterlife, does just that.

We also have a website dedicated to the legal aspects of digital estate planning called Digital Estate Resource.

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.