Show HN: What happens if you disappear
cronu.com
cronu.com
- Company tanks.
- Company gets acquired, and your private data gets mined.
- Company gets hacked and database dump gets posted.
I think I'd rather stick to the old methods of sealed envelopes and trusted friends or a lawyer. It's more reliable and requires less brain time slices ("Does the comapny still exist? Has it been hacked or acquired?" etc)
- An insider misuses powers.
People are raising valid concerns about your product, and instead of listening and accepting early feedback from HN, you are all over this discussion, defensively arguing with everyone. Just sit back, hear what people have to say, and then decide for yourself if you want to make changes, or reject the feedback.
- Email account gets hacked, and you can't respond to emails anymore.
- Spam filter bug filters the service's emails for 3 consecutive weeks.
- You are simply hospitalized for a few weeks, maybe under anesthesia, maybe in a temporary coma, maybe some memory loss.
A "dead man switch" needs to be more robust for really sensitive stuff IMO.
I guess this would work for more casual documents, passwords to facebook, whatever. I have a document printed out and kept in our file cabinet for such things, so I would not use this service, but I can see where other people might.
Your service has some use cases... but please do not tell me you seriously expect it to replace lawyers when it comes to managing one's estate.
It's a cute idea, and maybe something I'd consider for a small, one-time fee, but I definitely would never pay monthly for it.
Edit: I read the description one more time and it seems that you send an email three times. But still I don't see how not answering email is a good way to determine that I'm dead.
Oh boy. I can see so much going wrong with this.
If this is true, how can your service work? If I'm dead, I can't log in to generate a decryption key so my message can be sent in the clear.
If your service works, how can this be true? If it can decrypt and send my message in the clear when I'm dead, I very evidently don't need to log in for decryption to occur.
You say:
> To make sure you are well and sound, Cronu will charge your card a dollar a month.
I would insert "and to ensure your message remains available", as written this feels so inauthentic as to be mildly offensive.
And then take that dollar a month from myself and from a few others, and spin up some paid instances. Pick a couple hosts that are likely to be around for a long, long time, and get a box from each, and make your service redundant. Show that you've paid for service from these providers and have paid up for the next 10? 50? 100 years. Register cronu.com for the next 10? 50? 100 years (this expiry date is easily verified with whois) because you obviously can't send email from cronu.com if your domain registration expired. Right now, your expiry is in September of next year.
Paying for these instances is what distinguishes you from a free monthly dead-man-switch email and makes you worthy of receiving that dollar.