Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ryel | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a better way of determining whether you were alive or not.

There's an endless number of possibilities as to what could happen in order for me to not be able to go online and verify with that link. Why would I put myself through the stress of potentially forgetting and now I have to worry about the secrets of my dying breathe being released to the public while I'm still around.

If I wanted anything to be taken care of I'd feel much safer keeping it in offline storage with a note attached.

What I think you should do is have a tiered level of notifications. For example an email every week is the first round of notifications. Then I wonder if you could pull my last login info from major services that are going to be around for awhile like Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook(debatable), and if I havent logged into any of those services in 1 week, then go to the final round of notifications which is an in-person phone call.

View on HN

How about a site where you enter your SSN? Then if you're ever listed as deceased in the Social Security Death Index, that will be the trigger.

SSNs aren't unique, so this seems quite risky.

Wow! I had no idea. According to http://www.idanalytics.com/news-and-events/news-releases/201...

> More than 15 percent of SSNs are associated with two or more people. More than 140,000 SSNs are associated with five or more people. Significantly, more than 27,000 SSNs are associated with 10 or more people.

Yup. It was stated over and over again that SSNs were not supposed to be a form of ID, but nobody pays attention...

I've always wondered how the SS administration deals with this. SSN _should_ be unique, but in practice they're not, so how do these people deal with taxes and _gasp_, social security?

If I were to guess I'd say they use other ID factors such as name/dob

That article is referring to corporate records, though, and leads with the fact that many people have multiple SSNs if you track all their commercial accounts as gospel truth. Does social security actually hand out duplicate SSNs, or is this all caused by people not remembering theirs/bad typing?

A week seems like a short amount of time. If you're dead, we're not talking about safety here—urgency is less important. I think even a mail every month would be sufficient.

That's what http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ (disclosure: I wrote it) does, it also has configurable intervals so you can make them as short or as long as you want. It sends you an email every interval, and, if you don't reply to any of them, it sends your messages.

Can I have copies of all the user submitted data? Probably full of bank account details, safe combos, etc.

The problem that isn't being considered is the same as people who say "I don't care if I die from a stroke (or heart attack)". It doesn't take into account that you might get either issue and not die but be incapacitated.

Consequently anything that relies on a reply to determine if someone is still alive (even with notifying relatives) simply isn't going to end up solving the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com