We interviewed Nate Lustig, co-founder of Entrustet at Digital Death Day 2010. This is another of several interviews with digital afterlife leaders recorded at the event. You can listen below or read the transcript.
Interview with Nate Lustig
Evan: This is Evan Carroll here from The Digital Beyond and as you know I have been at Digital Death Day, and this is another in our series of podcasts from Digital Death Day. Right now I am sitting down with Nathan Lustig he is the co-founder of Entrustet, another of the digital afterlife services and of course you can those at our Online Services List at the thedigitalbeyond.com. Nathan, would you tell me a bit about Entrustet and what you do?
Nathan: Sure, we’re a free online service for people to go in and make last wishes for digital assets. Digital assets are any online account you might have or file on your computer. So when you pass away or before you pass away we would like you to go in and make your last wishes. So you can say if you would like your online assets deleted or transferred to an heir.
Evan: I know you have another service you call the Account Incinerator. Would you tell me a bit more about that?
Nathan: Sure, so Account Incinerator is going to be launching in mid to late June, and what it does is it privately deletes any account you wouldn’t want anyone to ever find. So you can use your imagination on what sort of accounts would be there. The way it works is you put that information in and then the Entrustet experts go in and delete it for you so no one ever stumbles upon it.
Evan: How can I be sure that the Entrustet experts won’t release that information?
Nathan: It’s part of the contract that we won’t do it, but you are just going to have to trust us.
Evan: I understand. So like I said, we are here at Digital Death Day, and we have had some very engaging conversations. We’re actually nearing the end of the day. Tell me what the most meaningful thing you heard here today was?
Nathan: I think the most interesting part has been the conversation that has developed around what the terms of service should be for companies and what companies should use as their policy. One of our main focuses is trying to help companies, through our corporate partnership program, learn about these sorts of issues. We’ve been working together to try to figure out what should these baseline points be. Because we believe at Entrustet that it’s not something that the laws catch up to, it going to be consumers forcing companies to create the ability to transfer and delete accounts according to their wishes. It’s been really interesting to hear from a wide variety of perspectives on what the best way to do it is.
Evan: Very good, that is very interesting stuff. So We’re talking a lot about the future here and what’s going to happen next, in your mind what’s next for the digital afterlife community?
Nathan: With the growth of the Internet and how everybody is online, in the next ten years everyone is going to have their digital assets either in a will or in a service like ours or there has to be some way people can manage their digital assets after they die. I think that going forward it’s going to be a growing industry especially with more companies coming into it every day, more like every week not every day, lots and lots of companies are coming into it and it’s a quickly growing industry. I think that as people get comfortable with it they are going to be signing up for services like ours day after day.
Evan: Very good. Well Nate, thanks for taking the time and sitting down with me and with our listeners at The Digital Beyond we look forward to hearing from you in the future.
Nathan: No problem!
