So the infographic is from http://www.lifeinsurancefinder.com.au/  An Australian comparison site for insurance, therefore looking for hits and sales  :) They have a walk through webpage that talks to :

• Digital Privacy After Death - What Will Happen To Your Online Profile When You're Gone?
• Why You Should Get a Digital Will & A Digital Executor
• Personality Predictors + Artificial Intelligence = Digital Resurrections
• What Will Be Determined to be of Digital Importance & How Will it be Preserved?

It is a good resource and well researched and I am delighted that they touched on issues for business owners, however, all Will’s become public at death so please don’t put your identity and passwords in any document.  Further the site does not address the thorny issue of “shared”  accounts. This could be the family email account that is in the name of the person who died.

<br />Produced by Life Insurance Finder

Tony - no Apple fan boy, but deeply respectful of a master craftsman  

Adam is the Editor-in-Chief at Mashable http://www.mashable.com/author/adam-ostrow

A topic that keeps coming back and here is another post on it - what happens to your digital footprint when you die ?

Image : I had a flashback of something that never existed

The interpretation of "Do you want the right to be forgotten?" in my mind is a war of words and misunderstandings.  On the top of one hill overlooking the battle field is a camp full of the privacy brigade who are awash with good use cases and top attention grabbing headlines. Pitched up on the other hill are the web 2.0 companies who want your data so they can offer a service for free; avoiding pay walls, annoying advertising and slow death.  In no-mans land are the regulators and the battle is being watched by us as aware, but not really caring participants, who have a live stream and a back channel for those who happen to want to voice an opinion on the current trending social media platform.  This is different topic  to the "do not track me" debate.  

So what do we (I) actually want.....

A right - "something that affords me some kind of protection"  The Wiki definition is better

A right to rescind - legally the ability to back out of something your have committed to - already established in law

A right to delete (a specific piece of your content) - "technically" you can delete anything you have created. Physically when published your content/ data can be copied and pasted by a third party and therefore this ideal of delete becomes rather hard to in-force or do. If you were mindful of this fact and you published everything with "all rights reserved" and copyrighted then no-one can do anything with your content unless you grant a licence and you can use the law to get your content removed.  However this will prevent you from using any web service as their terms and conditions will not grant you this.  However there is the case of "In the Public Interest" (not the public is interested in) as in this case your personal rights (to delete, remove or hide) could be overtaken by the rights of society as a body.  Other complications included you wanting to delete content about you that someone else created.  You are protected by privacy and libel laws but extending Rights to you to delete my comments on you violates my freedom of speech; so let us stop here on this track before we question if you are trying to delete something that could prove you avoided paying tax, wanted to cause harm or admitted to a crime.

A right to be deleted - This is where you would like the right to be deleted (entirely) from a service such as Facebook.  This is really tricky unless you have no friends as there are links from others content to you and from your content to others.  It may be possible to hide your content, but deleting it would require you to have more rights that your friends over shared content.

A right to be forgotten - This picks up on the issues that are presented with delete and deleted when it becomes apparent you cannot delete data.  This is trying to find some neutral ground that makes your content/data anonymous so it does not identity you.   Again interesting theory, but your identity can be reconstructed from your data as this previous blog and therefore would this really give you any right?

A right to be ignored - Moving past the flippant responses to this, you can already choose to switch off cookies, browse in private/ incognito and with no tracking.  However, the more I ignore you and your data the worse your web experience will become as I blast you with more and more untargeted adverts or put a pay-wall in to make you pay.  

A right to control - Control assumes understanding and/or ability.  This is a tricky as you may have many rights for control, but that does not mean you know how to use them or what happens when there is a conflict between your controls and your desires.  ( don't share my data, give me a free service)

A right to only have selected things collected - This is ready available....  is there an issue with the UI/UX or to businesses just want to hide these controls...

A right to understand what the hell you are doing with my data.   Now this is an interesting one for me.  As it stands my understanding is that with data protection laws we have rights to see what companies hold on us (Information access rights) however, when they have run your data via their own algorithm the output (analysis) is theirs and you have no rights to see the output.  Companies will ague that this is their IP and that access to input and output would enable someone else (competitor) to work out what the magic of the black box does and destroy value.  There is a potential conflict here between information and corporate rights.  However, do we care if we get value from the service.

----

So do I want the right to be forgotten? Probably but nut and sledge hammer springs to mind.

more reading....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8388033/Online-right-to-be-forgotten-confirmed-by-EU.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/mar/18/forgotten-online-european-union-law-internet

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/21/do-you-have-the-right-to-be-forgotten-on-the-internet/

http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/show-politics/is-it-our-right-to-be-forgotten.html

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/03/a-right-to-be-forgotten-forget.html

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/facebook-questions-eu-right-to-be-forgotten-24509

Not a new topic for this blog - previous posts are here http://blog.mydigitalfootprint.com/tag/death

A very good article appeared from the New York Times By ROB WALKER Published: January 5, 2011 using the Photo Illustration by Penelope Umbrico above ‘‘Sunset Portraits, From 8,462,359 Sunset Pictures on Flickr, 12/21/10’’ 

I am not repeating it or doing a summary as it worth spending 15 minutes and reading it.

There are also 83 comments which capture a hugh range of opinion Read All Comments (83) »

Things to adds from me....as so many good point have been made already

Payments - who is responsible for paying for services to keep them alive, you cannot pass on liability.

30% bother to sort wills - 70% don't - the Internet stats are likely to be worse given our attitude to backup

Signing rights that are not aligned to terms and conditions is not a proposition that will work - what you want has to aligned to what you have agreed to.

Digital tech is unstable, difficult to store/ curate and has an on-going cost - do you want to destroy your children's future but keeping all this data, it that your choice?

We need to forget "some-things" - detail is not good.

I have written a number of times on dealing with death and the relationship to your digital footprint

Rule 31 from my 31 new social rules for living in a digital age is about finding someone you trust to ensure that your digital estate can be managed.  Digital Estate Planning appears to be growing   AssetLock.net, Legacy Locker, Deathswitch.com  and

My Webwill  aim to address the issues raised  by enabling online users to securely store online information like logins and passwords to be passed on to relations after death - however you need to tell someone and  Excel does work as a cheap alternative.

On a related but different slant there is E-Tomb which is a solar powered tomb with bluetooth to enable relatives to visit your online profiles and memories after you passed away.

They have built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.

 If you want a copy of the information you've put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download. To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions. We'll begin rolling out this feature to people later today, and you'll find it under your account settings.

There is a video on Mark Zuckerberg blog http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434691727130

Some interesting correspondence following yesterdays post about "Being a professional and having social anonymity is a crime"

These images are my response to "How to 'hang' yourself in public and why we should hide"

• You can do it your self (or with the aid of some enemies)
• You can present your achievements in a public place
• You can do something stupid
• You can misunderstand the term

Within the context of a digital footprint why is this important.   Digital footprints are about what you say about yourself and what others say about you.

You can control what you say about your self

You probably are unaware of what data you have provided about yourself and to who and who they will use it

You don't control what others say about you (unless they break the law)

You have no idea what data there is out there that links to you from your network

Given this, behave like a professional and you will probably have a digital footprint to be proud of which describes you and your digital interactions and create value for you and for others.  

Why print with never die by a digital evangelist. And the reason is that, as of today, it is just too difficult to manage your data.  Two things have recently co-joined to make me think this.

Over the summer I purchased the Epson 650 scanner (awesome bit of kit) so that my daughters could scan old photo’s so that they could load images up to Facebook.  They got very board very quickly and I am left with about 5,000 pictures to do and I have become very selective about what I am now scanning. They also discovered that it is quicker to take a picture on their iphone of the desired picture and side load it.  Who says that they don’t get IT.

Over the weekend, whilst in the attic, I found my old Samsung Super 8mm camcorder.  After a quick clean of the battery terminals (note to self, again, don’t store anything with batteries) the machine pinged into life and we (family plus grandparents) spend Sunday laughing like man people at the poor camera work, our fabulous sense of fashion and dancing techniques.  My daughters are not so keen to load this content to YouTube for some reason and it will remain restricted to private viewings.

However these two media experiences have made me realise just how hard it is to digitise content to keep it and in what format.  Without the camera I had no playback, without the physical images (pictures) my kids would not have know the pictures were there.

I have written extensively about the “six screens of life” (the lit screens where we create and consume) and indeed the 7^th screen (the dark one which is where content is until we view it.) Obvious but it should be said but our physical world is the same as digital, it is dark until we view it, but the ease of accessing already printed material makes it a winner today for some content.

So I have a content problem matrix

Print wins out in a number of ways for material already printed, but will “immediate on” help digital win for digitised content?  

• Discovery.  Discover is still a black art in both digital and physical worlds as it requires you to stumble across it, however physical has a element of recall about its form. Photo frames, screen savers will always compete with book shelves.  However video/ movie content is as difficult in analogue and digital worlds as it depends on technology
• Archive.  Defiantly my issue.  Getting the content into a suitable format and which format for long term storage and ensuring it can be found and put on a lit screen.

Therefore my view, as of today is that print with never die as it is just currently too difficult to manage my print data, but video/movie is a problem whatever.  However itunes has shown that I can swap from my LP’s to digital using thumbnails, maybe that is what I need for my videos, but not one thumb nail but 9 (nine) per image so a get a sense of the content/ context which is not always captured in the first screen.  Tagging and naming for video needs to be made easier.

Click here to download:

oledata.mso (7 KB)

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This is a site to help you "delete your account"  - however this does not delete your data or your digital footprint.....

http://deleteyouraccount.com/

This site provides a guide to resetting some factory defaults on your mobile before you recycle it - again take care, deep techies can still recover some of the data, but mr joe public will not be able to.

http://www.hardresetguide.com/