Digital Will

A conversation with a bunch of colleagues yesterday got me to thinking. We were in our usual free form Socratic Dialogue mode and were discussing the drive to digitisation of personal media and what concept, if any, the general public had of the longevity or persistence of their data.

With the human weakness in our inability to empathise with our future selves and the short term focus that a fast moving society engenders, have we really thought things through sufficiently. When I upload my photos to Flickr, I’m just assuming they are going to be there forever or more accurately I don’t perceive of any time at which they won’t be there. If I think about it a little longer I suppose I assume that the Flickr system will ensure a roll with the times and that my pictures will be retrievable and trans-codable into whatever system makes sense as the years go by.
The Urban myth would have us believe that the data which ran the ‘69 Moon landing is no longer readable and we’ve forgotten the format of the tapes – though I’m sure I’ve read that Nasa has migrated this data.

This idea of long term storage and retrieval is a debate in its own right, but it’s a side bar topic I want to discuss here.
Projecting into the future naturally brings forth thoughts of mortality and so linking this with data persistence… What happens to our data after we die?

I’m not concerned so much with the filling of endless servers with the personal media of departed Internet users. Accounts can expire just the same as people and most services have procedures for the cleaning up of dormant data.

What I am more concerned with is the ability to nominate a digital next of kin. Let us for now avoid the thorny issue of DRM and over legislation surrounding collections of online music or video purchases and concentrate on user generated media.

If I store my digital photos online, for backup security reasons, and I am no longer around to maintain the account, how can my wife retrieve the data? Photos are a particularly emotional asset and the thought that certain pictures may be beyond the reach of my family due to lack of login and password information is not a comfortable one. Are we supposed to duplicate all our media?

Social networks allow the sharing of data, but usually only while all party accounts are maintained.

But what about email, diaries, message logs, blog data etc or whatever other data ends up being remote stored as the technology marches on? I guess that writing letters to the service providers with copies of a death certificate is one option, but surely there must be a way of making life easier for the bereaved.

I guess what I am suggesting is that when singing up for a service, one of the bits of profile information I should be able to give is the nomination for a digital next of kin, who has the right to access and retrieve data. In fact it may be useful to have a nominated other who can access my account for many less morbid reasons.

So, maybe digital identity systems (federated or otherwise) need to become more mature, trusted and more widely adopted in order to underpin this system, but it has to be worth thinking about. Should each service make its own provision for such functions or is this a function for a digital identity provider? Maybe your digital next of kin could be logged as a facet of your digital ID profile, essentially giving them access to all your systems as a trusted agent.

Or maybe hard copy will win out! Prints for digital photos certainly seem very popular.

What exactly will happen to all our data when the first digital generation reaches the end of its days?