I've long thought of a start up that would offer a kill switch service. Something that you checked into every so often to verify you were still alive (by email, text, or it just monitored your social feeds). If over a custom set period of time 30-365 days, if it hadn't heard anything it would attempt to confirm you're still alive either by notifying you directly or a friend to confirm if you weren't. At which point it will notify services to suspend accounts, or send a list of passwords or account access information to those you trust to handle deactivating your facebook, twitter,or turning it into a memorial of sorts (since I guess your social feeds kind of become a digital memorial of your life). The killer feature even possibly delete sensitive data you don't want relatives seeing on your computer by installing some client app. :P

I don't know I'm surprised a kill switch service like this doesn't exist.

I wrote this for just me a while back, and everyone I talked to about it thought it was morbidly weird. I'm glad there are others who think it isn't, but that might be something a startup had to contend with.

Wills and life insurance are morbidly weird, but like it or not people need them. People have "digital" estates now, that need to be managed just as much as one's physical affairs once they die.

Please take a look at our company eterniam.com which preserves your digital estate. I would love your feedback.

Any change you could publish it? I would love to have this myself

I don't know about this person's service, but someone else posted something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6471713

Google actually has a form of this, called Inactive Account Manager. You can pick an amount of time and who you want to control your information when you die (or go into a coma?). Pretty awesome, I set mine up already.

https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive‎

Your link seems to have some hidden chars at the end, which is why it's not working (for me, atleast). Here's the link without the extra chars - https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

Hmm very strange! All I did was copy/paste, oh well. Thanks for the working link, hope people take advantage of it.

Thank you this. I didn't know about this feature. I'm glad my wife could now get access to all of my email, contacts and photos once I'm gone.

This is the on-line version of the "If I die, get rid of my porn stash so my mom won't find it."

That's really not what I took away from this. Why do you... you know, care what happens to your online accounts? Web accounts are no more special than your library or toll road accounts. The only reason bank accounts matter at all is because the contest need to be disbursed.

Do you want your on-line account compromised with Viagra spam after your death? Do you want your grieving family to receive BIGGER PENIS NOW advertisements from you once you've passed?

How exactly would my passing cause this?

Your passing wouldn't cause it; and it could happen to anybody. However having it happen after you die is going to have an emotional impact on those who are still alive. How would it feel to open up facebook and see that you have a message from your deceased spouse? Not very good I imagine.

I think it is entirely reasonable that some people would want to prevent this from happening.

We can never completely escape the echos of the past.

And your platitudes don't actually address the points raised.

Because (a) it sucks to be sending messages to an old friend online, wondering why he won't respond and not knowing that he's dead; (b) it sucks to get birthday messages and "reconnect" notices and spam from someone that you know is dead. Just like the article said and all the other comments mentioned, y'know?

I like being reminded occasionally of my friends who have passed. I stop, think about them, and cherish their memory.

It is selfish to not inform your online contacts & friends of your death. Think of it that way.

Any suggestions on how to actually do this?

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is what I wrote years ago to do it. Make sure your messages don't scare people too much, in case you forget to check in/don't get the emails, though.

One thing that always kept me awake about this idea is the fear of false triggering.

Yeah, there is a small risk, although, in all the years, it's been two instances where emails stopped going out and some people forgot to log in in that duration (nothing has ever gone out before its time).

You can customize your notification intervals to make them longer or more frequent, if you want. The risk isn't very big, though, especially if you remember to log in every first of the month, for example, just to make sure.

There are several services of varying levels of service, but honestly it's not that hard to write up a small script to fire off an email to get you to turn off the switch for a month. After multiple failures it assumes you are dead and sends a payload email to a trusted friend.

You can easily prepay up a good sum on most hosts, aws, digital ocean, etc. plenty of good low-cost mail apis too, like mailgun.

You might want to check out Perpetu. It allows you to specify what happens to your online accounts (e.g. forward all your emails, write your final Facebook post, delete all tweets, etc): www.perpetu.co