An interesting conversation rose the other day between Chris and I. We were discussing something fairly random and the topic just came up – In the eyes of web 2.0, what would you leave your spouse if you were to pass away? Traditionally, you would leave your will, banking details, policy details and the likes, but these days there are far more interesting details to think about.
Let’s take a look at me as a quick example – If I were married and had to pass away, I would have a couple interesting things to leave my wife – My Adsense account, my Traffic Synergy account and a number of other online account details, not so? What about all my server details, website logins and everything that exists online under my name. Chris and I discussed this for some time and as we went on, more and more things krept up. For the past several months of my life I’ve seen my online affiliate accounts reach 5 financial digits, which is a fairly large sum of extra month every month, it’s close to a decent monthly salary – If I were to pass away, I would have to get these details to my wife, as she could probably live off it! I would probably have to leave a tutorial behind with detailed instructions as to how she would go about sorting all of this out! When should I write these tutorials?
Times have changed substantially, is the world aware of all of this? Is the world geared up to deal with everything online and the massive rate of increase in the involvement of online life in peoples every day lives? Personally, I don’t think so. Think of it this way.. most of these new online involvements have only really taken off in large ways over, perhaps, say 5 or so years – the world cannot be geared up to handle both offline life as well as online life yet – I don’t feel we have the infrastructure to deal with it all. Fortunately, the generation which is most involved in this online living is still relatively young and mass problems would not occur for another good 40-50yrs, so there is time to prepare, but are steps being taken yet?
The topic is extremely interesting and I could go on and on for hours about it, but I would prefer to stop here and hope to receive some opinions from you!
rad post..
Interesting concept hey!
The easiest way would be to give your GMail account details to someone or have it written down somewhere for them.
And a list of sites you are subscribed to.
Then one can do a “forgot password” on those sites etc.
But ja, this is definitely a new issue in the world, as most places like your email account isn’t in the same country as you, so you can’t just show up with a death certificate asking for access like you could for say a bank account.
Another thing that would help is to have your good friend, who can kinda work with websites etc to have your username and password in case you disappear.
But actually this is kinda like the guy who has lots of cars and property etc. When he passes away, his wife is left with it. So what, she could carry on managing the stuff, but hell, she’ll most probably just sell it cause it’s too much trouble.
Same thing with the internet, she’d sell the sites if she could, but it’s not tangible and would probably get ripped off if she tried.
All comes to pass.
Ye, I thought about the ‘forgotten password’ thing too.
def.. send me an email with your adsense accounts and thing, I’ll look after them buddy :)
I find it such an interesting topic, and it really makes me think I should definitely be looking to marry a geek cos I don’t feel like writing tutorials! haha!
Guess we’ll just have to kind of wait and see what happens..
Swak thing is how your profiles (e.g. on Facebook) stays behind etc.
There was a guy who passed away recently here and was on Facebook, his friends sent him messages on his wall. Must be weird to have a friend still on your list when they aren’t alive anymore.
Oh, What you must do is give a friend a password to a place that stores your passwords. And when it is used, you get a notification (e.g. email), so he can’t use it without you getting notified.
I’m sure there was a site like this, a time-lock type thing, but I can’t remember it now.
Ya, that Facebook scenario is freaking – I’m no so impressed with that sort of thing, but I mean there’s not much that can be done really.
I thought about writing a security box style website, where people could store their account details, etc. but it would have to be so super secure!