Why You Need a Digital ‘Dead Man’s Switch’
Why You Need a Digital ‘Dead Man’s Switch’
From alerting your family to trouble to ensuring folks have access to your accounts, there are several reasons to set one up.
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Been thinking about building something for this. It's especially useful for cryptocurrencies since there's no legal means through regular estate law to turn them over. Just some encryption keys. The current solutions are meh and require other crypto natives to operate.
I kind of like the idea of encrypting your important afterlife bits on a thumb drive (with gpg or whatever). Give half the encryption key to two different people in your life that you trust. If they both have the thumb drive and their keys they can decrypt it and do what they want. Just tell them what they'd be looking for, give the drive to an estate lawyer or other trusted third party, or a bank's safe deposit box.
Could be pretty effective, and you don't have to worry bout some rando company being breached or doing something shitty with your data.
See I'd want something similar but for my various online accounts and infrastructure. For example, my family knows Jack about my AWS instances. They'd have to hire someone to make sure that they got shut down.
So a script to set up various items so that upon my death AWS will stop billing would be amazing.
That and to delete my porn, format my drives, and delete my internet history. Actually, just a script to slag the drives would be the best.
Billing wise, as soon as the CC company is notified of your passing, the card is canceled and typically the debt is forgiven as long as you are the sole card signatory.
Stopping AWS instances would be handy, but your idea to slag the drives is unnecessary.
Just set up full disk encryption for everything.
You die -> no key -> no data
Got to go nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.