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Oct

6

Who will archive when you die?

Editorials, Ideas 

So you blog, post comments, use Twitter, post photos on Flickr, videos on Youtube, talk with friends on half-a-dozen networking sites, and yes, send and receive tons of email. 

Which is all very fine. Until the day you die.

What happens to your digital possessions after you’re no longer around? It’s a question without a good answer, mostly because it hasn’t been asked often enough. Understandably. The Internet’s only been around some 15 years, and we’ve only begun putting personal info on the Web (Here’s a broad list) for about 5 or 6 years. In other words, very few of us from the Internet Age are dead yet.

But we’ll need answers in the next few years. Archiving and preserving a departed loved one’s online possessions is going to be a huge opportunity not so long from now. I say opportunity because things aren’t as straightforward in the online realm as in the physical, and there’s plenty of scope for smart thinking and innovative solutions.

Imagine you’re a startup that specializes in archiving digital creations. You’ve been commissioned by the departed’s relatives to preserve digital memories. Consider three issues you’d face:

Tracking:

What did your client (well, client’s loved one anyway, let’s just call him/her the client) create on the Internet? You can cover the obvious - email/chat/blog/microblog/photos/videos/social network. Then you get to the hard stuff: all the comments he/she’s posted on websites, forums he/she’s been active on, scraps/wall posts on friends’ social network pages, old email accounts he/she might have had in the past. and so on. 

Right now there is no reliable way of tracking this. How will you go about this?

Ownership:

Who owns data that your client had put up? The answers for some of these are straightforward - does Google own your videos on YouTube? Does Yahoo own your photos from Flickr? Read the fine 
print. But what about the scraps/wall posts your client wrote on his/her friend’s Orkut/Facebook profile? Comments on his/her friend’s blog? One view is that since they’re on the friend’s Orkut profile, they belong to the friend. The counterview is that scraps belong to whoever wrote them. 

Matters are further complicated if the client had stated before death that he/she wanted this sort of data deleted post-death. Will the owner of the blog that your client had commented on allow it?

Another question is about transfer of ownership. If Alice has had an email conversation with Bob that she would not want anyone other than Bob to view, should she have the right to veto the transfer of his email account to his next of kin? Perhaps she revealed her birthday and birth year to Bob. Could she veto the archival of his calendar?

Context:

This is closely related to ownership. Often, data by itself is useless without the context it was originally created it. A comment your client left on a blog post has very little value without its original blog post. A scrap/wall post or a “reply” tweet even less so. A pretty picture your client clicked and uploaded on Flickr is greatly diminished in value, significance and memory without the comments it sparked. A social network profile without the accompanying network is hardly social. But archiving the context along with your client’s content will raise the above ownership issues.

These are problems we haven’t faced with physical possessions because these problems never applied to them. How we sort them out is a both a tricky business and a business opportunity.


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Viewing 5 Comments

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    Hmmm that's an interesting. I have thought about this...especially about the blog and the photos I keep uploading on flickr.

    My personal take on this is that most people wouldn't want to go to elaborate details to handover email, messages etc to someone after their death. Artifacts like blog might be kept alive and would die eventually if it's not interesting enough for the next gen. But things like photos, mail etc are the most valuable only to the person who owns them (assuming that everyone has their own mail, archive of photos etc) and once they pass way, there wouldn't be much value in maintaining it (unless the person was famous!). I guess the only thing people might worry about that is that any sensitive information would not be exposed to people after their death. But maybe, they wouldn't care. They are in a different world!
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    GWBE,

    You have a point when you say " most people wouldn't want to go to elaborate details to handover email, messages etc to someone after their death..." But I'm betting that families are going to want to archive - or at least maintain a copy of - their loved one's digital possessions. From there will grow a complicated tangle of issues, three of which I discussed.

    Your point about "blog(s) might be kept alive and would die eventually..." also makes me think of the tremendous amount of digital flotsam that is accumulating on the web every day. After all, it takes money to store, host, back up and serve this data - data that owners no longer want. This might sound incredibly naive, but I often wonder whether we won't one day require spring-cleaning for the web!
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    I've thought about this problem (and opportunity) for some years now. Do not have the bandwidth right now to go into the details, however will just say thing - your approach seems to be from a 'forensic' approach and issues around it. A more ready market might be 'executor' services for the e-parts of Wills . Remind me to talk about it some time we meet (/online)
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    Karra,

    Both comments on this post begin with "I have thought about this..." - statement on our generation? :P

    Interesting that Priya says "most people wouldn't want to go to elaborate details to handover" their digital possessions, while you talk of a ready market for "'executor' services for the e-parts of Wills". Finally, I looked at this from the deceased's family's point of view - what they'd want done.

    Wonder what the immediate market really is.
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    Hm, I guess Priya and I have different kinds of 'online information' in mind. I have more 'serious' stuff, like online access to banks, for e.g. - if a bloke dies, nothing prevents someone from operating the account online using the password/secure key etc. - stuff that is impossible in the world of paper and signatures. I think this problem is interesting in some way, and I would bet it points to many legal gray areas, at least in places like India.

    _Access_ to one's personal space and online identity after death has many uses other than just archival and preservation of content placed online.
 
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