Spam, Spam Spam; Digital Afterlife - Google-style

Here are some late breaking (April, 2013) additions to Reality Bytes.

Spam, Spam, Spam ...

This post is especially short, because the source for it is Peter Lewis, and he is a much better writer and it is his personal story.  In the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15, Peter began encountering new waves of spam which set his blood to boil.  One particularly distasteful and macabre batch used the tragedy in Boston to entice readers.  After a teaser message, readers were given a link to further information.  Clicking on a link would result in malicious software being loaded onto the computer.  Another wave involved email received through Facebook.  By referencing one person that Peter knew, the Facebook email tried appear legitimate -- an extension of Facbook's "friend of a friend" connectivity designed to build ever wider circles of interaction among users.  The Facebook email, however, also contained a malicious link.  Peter dashed off a hasty post to his Facebook friend:   “Friends don’t let Facebook friends spam other Facebook Friends." You can read Peter's full, much more colorful story in his column Words & Ideas at www.peterlewis.com or at this link. 

Planning Your Digital Afterlife -- Google-style

I have written before about the digital footprint that we all are creating and will leave behind when we die.  Examples:  Personal information, photographs and other memorabilia on Facebook or other social media, customer accounts with online services like iTunes or Amazon, playlists on Spotify, and personal files stored in the "cloud" that may back up everything from personal journals to your banking and tax records.  Not to mention the digital archive of email, Twitter posts, listservs, and blogs like Reality Bytes.  There are significant issues over who controls all this after you are gone.  There are contractual agreements with providers of these services in cyberspace.  Some states have enacted statutes to establish who has authority over and rights to these digital remains.  Maryland is considering such legislation.

Now, one of the most significant players in this domain, Google, has set forth a policy that it labels: "Plan your digital afterlife with Inactive Account Manager".  Google begins this policy statement by saying:

Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

What follows is really the introduction to an application, the aforementioned Inactive Account Manager (" not a great name, we know"), which enables Google users to make decisions about what data Google will delete or deliver to trusted contacts.  Giving you some idea of the scope of this application, Google states that this services covers:

data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube.

"Inactive" is certainly an interesting euphemism for death, but Google has a verification warning before it will do anything with your information.  It will send a text message to your cellphone and an email to your secondary address provided to Google.  You may have noticed, as I did, a recent prompt from Google when you logged in asking you to update, verify or provide a cellphone number and a secondary email address.  There is sort of leap of faith here that you have both a cellphone and a secondary email address, but it is probably the most reasonable approach.

I would urge all readers to check out Inactive Account Manager and post any comments or questions online at this blog.

POSTSCRIPT:
I actually went and set up the Inactive Account Manager for my Google services, which include this blog.  This took about 10 minutes.  It involves choosing some preferences and providing information on how you want Google to try and contact you if you have not used your account(s) for the period of time that you have chosen and on who you want to have access to your digital remains on the Google services mentioned above.  You need a cellphone number that Google can text and an email by which Google can contact the trusted digital caretakers for your data.


This may not mesh perfectly with the legal administration of your estate, but Google seems to have provided a fairly simple method for users to handle a portion of their digital afterlife.