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by nedwin 4254 days ago
Posted this in another thread but what company would you trust to launch and maintain this kind of service?

You need to know that when you kick the bucket in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years etc that the switch is actually going to work.

You need a company with the right moral compass; funding to pay for hosting, maintenance etc; and the longevity to keep going for the next 100 years.

Companies on the "maybe" list for me include Wikipedia, WordPress and maybe Evernote...

Internet Archive might be the best option if they can sustain their funding / longevity.

3 comments

> Posted this in another thread but what company would you trust to launch and maintain this kind of service?

A law firm. That is the "correct" answer to this problem and is what people actually use.

What about life insurance companies? It could be offered as an "addon" service.
That's a pretty good idea.

But in reality, they probably wouldn't make enough money from this for it to be worth the trouble to them.

I've been thinking about this as well. An interesting idea will be an opensource software that you can deploy on aws, azure or something like heroku yourself, and it emails you every month "are you alive?" if you don't answer for few weeks then it trigger some tasks, like sending passwords.

Again the problem is who will pay your aws when you are dead. But is supposed that you have been paying the latest invoices with your credit card. To be honest I haven't digg enough in the legal terms of these cloud providers.

To me it seems that there are two separate problems: 1) storying the information you want released upon your death, and 2) keeping it secure until that time.

For storing, perhaps a torrent or blockchain approach might work, where the encrypted data is stored on the computers of many users who 'buy into' this.

For release, I still feel that the safest way would be to give the 'key' to a trusted person (perhaps along with your will?). Any other approach leaves something so important too uncertain.