Dead Man's Switch
deadmansswitch.net
deadmansswitch.net
I love the idea of something like this - even better if it included some digital housekeeping, deleting what I'd rather delete, and sending what I'd like to share - but I think I'll have to build and maintain it for myself if I want it to last.
You hope ;). You can't predict some things, so it's good practice to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
That said, the old fashioned alternative is to set up a will with a notary.
I really don't trust anything to actually outlive me.
For example, me being alive could be determined by whether I logged into my machine over the last X days and a certain service ran. If it didn't, only then start bugging me to confirm manually.
Also, as others have already mentioned, I'd have very little trust that such service will still be around when I'll need it to trigger.
Something like scheduled gmail + a cronjob on my local machine that runs once a day and reschedules the email is something I'd imagine could work if I wanted to set up something like this for myself.
I would want a non-local machine, what if my house burns down with me? Whole point is that if I die, it fires
I feel that applies here, this doesn't need to take more than 10 seconds once a month (at least I would prefer it to be often enough that if it didn't come I'd recognize something was off - anything more than a month and I'd probably never notice if they stopped coming).
Each verification also serves the purpose of reminding you the service exists, that it is alive and at least gives you some indication and confidence that it will work when you want it to (also makes you think about it, after ten years maybe you'd want to update the content for it to still be relevant).
Also, I use it to email only one designated person who receives an email with a password hint to an encrypted folder containing all my important stuff in life such as passwords etc.
It’s called the “inactive account manager”, and you can use it to give other people access to your email account after a couple months of inactivity.
Maybe this would function as a layer of plausible deniability for telling everyone how you felt.
Which has an address of: 5th Floor, Genesis Building, Genesis Close George Town, Grand Cayman Cayman Islands, KY1-1106
Which also shares an address with: https://mcgrathtonner.com
Which also show up in the Paradise Papers: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/81077405
There would need to be some level of trust established with any organization handling e-mails, likely filled sensitive content. An unknown, faceless company in the Caymans doesn't instill that trust.
I think it's important something like this exists but I'd also ask the author if he's really thought this through.
Maybe a bug in your emailserver or that the configuration option that you used to correctly turn off the spam-filter had a bug in it and caused some of the I'm-alive signals to be dropped.
I think the author of this project probably has a slightly different use case in mind, but it's easy to imagine how a project that had my focus could quite easily get embroiled in lawsuits or other drama. I'd still like to do it one day, but it would need to be under circumstances of absolute isolation from myself both physically and legally. For the time being, I don't have the resources and/or time to make that happen, so shelved it was.
In countries with this kind of system, the only use case I can imagine for an additional commercial e-mail based service is if you don't trust your next of kin at all, so you don't want to leave the message forwarding up to them, or have messages whose recipients you want to keep secret from them.
Price: $10k
I'm sure there is some VC money in this.
The date not planned, but hopefully not until after XX years and god knows how many dot-com’s…
Maybe we also need a dead-man’s-switch for this dead-man’s-switch service