Planning for My Kidnapping

Same here. My biggest concern right now is with the third party browser extensions.

> "Just leave your phone at home?" basically did not compute.

I wouldn't leave my phone at home either; a smartphone is the single most useful thing to have on your person when facing unexpected problems of almost any kind. And no idea about those particular protests, but protesters over here have started heavily coordinating and sharing information via phones, so you might have an actual information deficit without one.

That said, switching off cellular (or the device itself), disabling biometric auth, that might be a good idea.

> But "Just leave your phone at home?" basically did not compute.

Your wallet contains a lot of pretty damn good ways for someone to impersonate you and rob you blind, yet "just leave your wallet at home" will stubbornly fail to compute for a lot of adults.

> In the past 10 years, I'm sure there have been multiple times when I've gone more than 30 hours with cellular service or WiFi.

In the last 10 years the longest I went without Internet was during trans pacific flights, so never longer than 15 hours. I think this level of connection —- basically intermittent connection during the entire waking hours —- is super common in today’s society.

If I was disconnected for longer than 30 hours w/o prior knowledge of being disconnected it would mean something seriously bad has happened to me, and it would be nice if my next of kin had access to all the documents they would need to settle my affairs.

Another way you can lose connectivity is going into an area that has too many people. I went to Madras, Oregon to view the 2017 total solar eclipse.

Madras is a small town of about 7 000 people, in a county of about 25 000 people. Estimates are that around 100 000 people came there for the eclipse. The cellular infrastructure there was not able to handle the volume.

For the ~28 hours I was there, I was never once able to view a web page via cellular internet. I and a friend who also picked Madras to watch from tried to call each other a few times, and never got through. Most text messages we tried to exchange were lost, although we did each manage to get a couple through, although those came through hours after they were sent.

We both had T-Mobile. I don't know how AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon were doing.

But if that happens, I expect they'd notify my emergency contacts in my phone, or at least my partner would get notified, and she'd tell everyone else who'd need to know.

> Well I'm kind of digital nomad so traveling very often and I also maintain a Saas platform

Sounds like a dream job really. The ubiquity of internet-everywhere these days - even in third-world countries - is quite astonishing really. When I was traveling in Kenya a decade ago I was able to blog (via 2G) in the middle of the Maasai Mara!

This is a pretty good approach. I hope you're periodically testing/replacing that flash drive though. I lost a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin because I assumed a flash drive would be fine after years of laying untouched in a desk drawer.

I hope they're all doing well now, but I'm not sure that really says much about the likelihood of being kidnapped.

Also the online setup may be confusing to the parents, depending on their experience level. And something may break in the online setup, some update becomes necessary, some library breaks, the server is down etc. etc. Too many things can go wrong. That's fine for a low stakes hobby thing, but not really for the "I became incapacitated" alert system. Having friends check up on you, giving copies of apartment keys to trusted friends and parents, providing some form of access to your bank account to your parents if you trust them, keeping an up to date physical list of banks and other places where you store money and so on is more important.

It's already difficult to keep all this info up to date. Keeping a technical solution maintained is just extra distraction from the main points. The key difficulty is anticipating all the issues that will pop up when you actually die, practical stuff like interactions with banks etc. What will your parents need to know? What untied loose ends do you leave behind? It's uncomfortable to think about these things so most people put it off.

I have my doubts that any human-memorizable password can be strong enough to withstand a concerted offline attack. If what you're encrypting has to stay secret for 10, 20, 30 years (probably not the case for a password database), then it's a complete non-starter.

From the FAQ on the site it seems you can nominate 5 but make a rule that only 3 (or 2 or 4 or whatever) need to agree. It's a balance between security and speed of access.

There is https://www.fidsafe.com/ operated free from Fidelity (a brokerage company that's been around a very long time).

While there are other document storage services, I'm not aware of any that make commitments for storing data 100+ years. For Fidelius I'm offering a 10 year notice / storage if the service ever sunsets, and I've seen similar from other companies.

The obvious concerns here are the storage media used, the DR plans for the service, and more importantly, trusting that the company will do right by you after you're gone – even if it goes under new management or bankrupts. While I always struggle to find applications for blockchain, perhaps this is a scenario where it could be useful... perhaps you could upload the encrypted data to the chain, and form a contract where the key to decrypt it is released after X years?

Make sure they are actually able to do this, too, and will be able to do this years from now, when everything you may have told them will be long forgotten. Most people have no idea what gpg is, have never used a command line, and have only a really basic idea of how encryption in general works.

Either a safe deposit box or a fireproof box. The former is a bit safer. The latter has more space than most safety deposit boxes and makes it easy to add/replace documents. Arguably at least documents that aren't especially sensitive but are important (e.g. insurance information) can be in the cloud somewhere and you can give a lawyer (and/or people you trust) the password.

> I can only think of financial stuff and those already have beneficiaries and whatnot specified when I set them up.

My financial accounts are probably the main things. I don't know that I have any beneficiary stuff set up on them.

I was maybe overly specific in my asking.

Basically the thing I am wondering is:

What do I need to have in place to make sure my wife / kids have access to my assets, etc. in the event that I die unexpectedly?

Social media presences come to mind, especially anonymous ones. I'd like my online friends to know I won't be back. If you have a blog, or otherwise publish, at least a brief announcement there might also be something you'd want to happen.

It would make cancelling subscriptions not needed anymore or transferring them to another person much easier I guess.

I'm more worried about my pictures of the kids. A few generations will care about them.

This is exactly something I intend to add to my document storage platform... I have some notes about it here: https://www.fideliusvaults.com/roadmap/. There's a balance of security and convenience that I've been calling the 'paranoia scale', and this sits on the far end towards 'least convenient, most secure'.

I have heard of Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm a few times in the past six months or so.

Today I finally decided to read the Wikipedia page and figure out how it works.

Really neat. Uses the fact that you need `k` points to uniquely define a `k-1` degree polynomial.

So if you want the secret to be recoverable by any `k` pieces, you just need to define a `k-1` degree polynomial and generate a series of points along that curve, with the secret at a known location on the curve

Basically it sets your secret to the polynomial constant term (i.e. the y value for x=0), generates random coefficients for the rest of the polynomial factors, and then computes however many points you requested. The shares are just encoded (x,y) pairs.

There is slightly more complicated math it to better obscure the secret, but in essence that's all it is. I thought that was really neat.

Would be a great tool for those pesky ghosts who aren't aware that they are dead.

> Only the problem is the the opportunity cost of the life insurance. What information can you possibly keep that's worth more than a few million dollars? For most people it's probably better to keep the insurance payout than it is to spend it on aws cracking.

Also, you have to keep the encrypted treasure a secret, or someone else with money could snatch it out from under the heirs.

If 1Password had this feature that would be amazing.

i am not sure you got that right from me. i probably should have made clear these are meant to be separate statements.

what i actually meant is the stuff he describes on how he expects this to work for him. for example a kidnapper would already know the best time to kidnap him is after he had lunch because that's a recorded activity which resets the timer. they also know he will send location data so they might take his phone on a different tour directly after kidnapping and there is probably more usable information in this post...

however, i assume here this is a kidnapping specifically targeting someone with proper due diligence. but that might not be very realistic at all and you actually are telling me about it. referring to them as fb/whatsapp users just made me think you might talk about technical aspects they would not get but i think there is more to it that might be easier to comprehend.

I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think “Donating your assets” would work (in any jurisdiction, but as I said, I’m not a lawyer, certainly not one versed in law in all countries of the world). Lawyers will argue that the fact that you set this up x months before death doesn’t mean that you still wanted it to happen when you died and/or that, at the time the assets were transferred you weren’t alive, so you couldn’t own the assets.

Yes, last wills do both, too, but they have a long history with lots of jurisprudence about what you can and cannot arrange for after you die, and how you should arrange that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_testament#Requirement...)

There's a chain of problems here. You'd need an open source GPS tracking app on your phone that has the rights to record and upload your location to a server whilst running in the background, then you need a personal server to store that stuff on, and then you need to find someone who knows what to do with that lot if and when you disappear.

No, clearly whoever kidnaps you is going to take your phone away. I mean something that probably gets embedded under your skin somewhere.