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Death is the forgotten state transition in identity lifecycle management. The identity industry has failed to deliver frameworks, tools, and guidance to enable consent-driven mechanisms for individuals to determine how to handle their credentials, data, and services after their disablement (temporary or permanent) or death. A new group is forming to make the internet a better place by solving this universal issue that impacts each and every human and their loved ones. Join us to discuss these weighty matters and learn about how to contribute.
Death is the forgotten state transition in identity lifecycle management. The identity industry has failed to deliver frameworks, tools, and guidance to enable consent-driven mechanisms for individuals to determine how to handle their credentials, data, and services after their disablement (temporary or permanent) or death. A new group is forming to make the internet a better place by solving this universal issue that impacts each and every human and their loved ones. Join us to discuss these weighty matters and learn about how to contribute.
We've got a trifecta of brains joining us for our next conversation on final footprints, and they'll be able to explain a little more what we can take away from a name like this. But up here on the stage, we've got our own Eve Eve mailer. Thank you for moderating as well. We have Khalia Young and we have Mike Kaiser. So please get comfortable and thank you. This stage is yours. Switching hats here for a second. Although I don't have a hat. Some people do.
We, we really appreciate your coming to this session. This was a sort of a last minute replacement session and it's, it's a topic that gets a little bit to heart and philosophy and real life along with digital identity that we all know and love. I'm Eve Mailer, I've been co-moderator this track, but I'm also privileged to have a role in this panel as well. And I'd love for you two to introduce yourselves. Sure. My name is Kalia Young. Some of you may know me as Identity Woman. That's the handle I've been using to blog and to work in this industry for about 20 years.
And I co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop. Some of you may have heard of it Just a bit. I'm Mike Kaiser, I'm the Director of Strategy and Standards at SailPoint. All right, well thank you guys for joining me, especially at last minute. So we're here to talk about what we had termed final footsteps and talking about digital legacies. When somebody passes away and they have what can be considered a digital estate, what should happen, what is happening, what are the challenges in these very difficult circumstances?
And we three had the privilege to be on a panel last week at Iver with Dean Sachs from Amazon Web Services, who has really been kind of a leading light on this topic and, and kind of holding a torch for better solutions than we have now. And unfortunately, Dean couldn't join us today.
You know, he shared a poignant story about we've lost people in this industry and he had lost a friend some years ago and he started observing. It kind of got him into identity. I don't wanna speak for Dean, but one of the things he shared was looking at what happens to LinkedIn when somebody dies. You may have noticed that you might have seen some posts that say, I'm happy to share that I have a new position as deceased at none. This is really, really common. And really heart-rending like that should not be the way that people find out about what happened to you.
There's family, there's loved ones, there's a whole circle of digital friends that we've all collected. And this was the context in which he brought us all together for conversation. And even just in the last week, the conversation has fortuitously moved forward a little bit by virtue of the kind of standardization mindset, the, the wonderful conversation that we have going on here. So I'll certainly invite all of you to share your questions with us, but for now, I kind of wanna catch us up to what we've been thinking, what we've been up to. So there's a little bit of a reprise of last week.
So, and now she goes to her notes. Well, I will Go for it. I'll add to what you just shared about LinkedIn. I haven't gotten any of these that recently, but I, I got several. Hi. I'm dead emails. Oh my gosh. Because that was the way that family members were able to communicate to their digital networks that somebody had passed. Like an autoresponder?
No, no. Like a, like they Logging in as them, Their email is the email sending the email and it's the family using it to communicate to the network of people to whom the deceased person is connected that they otherwise wouldn't know how to read. So That's even worse. That's even worse because you trust an email to come in from a person phishing aside, but it's a real email from somebody who's passed.
So, you know, why talk about death and the digital estate now? Like, has anything changed? What's going on now? One thing that's changed is that someone in our community, we lost him this past year, right? The last two years at EIC I've stood backstage as the session right after Vito's keynote. And it's something that I've missed this year, right?
It was, it was sudden, it was quick. And it kind of really brought to a lot of the forefront of a lot of our minds that this is an issue that people typically tend to ignore or tend not to want to discuss. But it's a, a classic intersection of identity technology and real world identity and real world humanity. So that's one thing I would say. Yeah. Do you have, where's, what's your perspective on why now?
Well, 'cause before it didn't go anywhere about, well over 10 years ago, I, I was part of co-facilitating and pulling together a series of conferences we called Digital Death Day. So they were unconferences situated next to IIW and we also had a couple in London. So really making space for people who think about this issue a lot. There's a whole academic discipline that considers this and a bunch of us thoughtful identity people at the time were thinking about this. But the industry wouldn't come out of its shell.
Like we were, you know, I did my best to reach out to, you know, we're in Silicon Valley at IW like Yahoo and LinkedIn and Google, and being like, Hey, do you have somebody who deals with, like, accounts for people who died? And they're like, we do, but we don't wanna talk to anybody. 'cause it's like they didn't wanna join a conversation about how there might be some common patterns or practices or norms throughout the industry.
But now I, since we're in a, there's potential now like that, that that just, there wasn't capacity or willingness to have this conversation. I don't know that we will for sure succeed, but I feel there's a different energy and momentum.
Yeah, I mean, I sense that, and you know, last year there was this sort of groundswell of, well, we seem to have solved authentication and then looking around for other problems to solve. And if that's the way in to talk about these difficult things, maybe that's the way in, you know, and you know, we, we've had the passing of some, some identity royalty and passing of a lot of folks, you know, passing of people in our lives.
And so, you know, with each passing year that identity itself as a discipline matures, I think it, it behooves us to just sort of talk about it and name the nameless. So one of the things that comes up when you think about like calling it a digital estate is, well it's property and you'd have an executor of an estate and is it simply she makes air quotes an a solution of handing that digital property to somebody else. Like Google has a solution.
Now, the inactive account manager where it sort of notices if you haven't been around for a while and you can sort of designate other people to sort of pick up the slack, but is it just a matter of property? I mean, you know, Mike, you come from disciplines other than tech.
So Yeah, there, I think there's a lot there, right? Like, it, it may be a matter of property, but even if like a legal framework is in place, that doesn't mean people have taken advantage of that legal framework, right? How many of you in this room have actually had a conversation with your loved one saying, if I am no longer here next week, here are the steps you take. Here's how you access.
Oh, I'm proud of you, by the way. I didn't know that. That's tough. Tough conversations. People Don't like having those conversations. When my father died, he didn't have that conversation with any of us. At the same time, my father's personality was the opposite of mine, by which, I mean he wrote everything down. He balanced his checkbook every week. What that meant was there was a, a filing cabinet I could pull open and I could find every account he ever had, every password, I think five passwords deep. Every time he changed it, he just, so it was super, super easy, right?
I have another friend whose partner was the opposite. He passed this past year quite again, quite quickly. He was a Linux administrator for 30 years that ran his own home network. And he was also very aqui, like, acquired a lot of stuff, we'll put it that way. She couldn't find all the networks, much less find the systems or the accounts. She happens to have some very talented friends who are world class white hat hackers. And so they volunteered to fly into town, discovered, mapped out her whole network, and then hacked into everything. Now most people don't have those friends, right?
And so I think that kind of moves us to, to not just have a, a legal framework, but some kind of technical process or something to a force these discussions, but also make it easier to, to, to have that process go more smoothly. Yeah.
I'll, I'll build on what you shared. I think through digital death day, I met some like super deep experts and two of them have a site death in the digital beyond, and they actually have a listing of over 50 different services related to, you know, sending messages after you die to like, here's the passwords you send to your loved ones, like different services trying to address this problem. The challenge is many of those services are old, it's unclear, you know, are they still even up and running? If I did use a service today, will it still work in 20, 30, 40 years after I die?
Am I keeping it updated with who I want to get that information? Like, there's just a ton of questions about the longevity of tools that are meant to address some aspects of this problem. And I think, you know, it would be interesting to consider what are like core essential functions? How do you, how do we as an industry support this function? Like staying alive, right? Like this is a almost a public service sort of tool, not a profit making thing. But if we don't have it running well, we're not doing service to us as a living or the people who are passing.
So how do we as you're like, what, what would be the standards if you did have a service? Do you get it certified that it's actually good and run well so that people could trust it?
Like, these are really good questions. Yeah.
If, if I'm no longer here next week, like my MySpace page, that can go away, right? I don't need that anymore.
But even, but you have to think about it. It's even more a technology problem. It's also an existential question, right? What are your personal beliefs? Does the person who passed away, do they still exist after they die in, in this world, quote unquote, I'm not trying to be facetious.
It, every culture is going to have a different expression at the very least of grief, if not life beyond death. So what does that mean for your digital life? Does that mean that my account should stay up for the same period of time that I'm mourning? Does it mean that I am, if someone is too famous that that has to stay up as a tribute? How do you lock that down? What about people that want to do things and keep you around digitally? Do you have to specify that I don't want to exist online explicitly?
There are lots of questions that, that tie into people's worldviews and we're gonna have to think through all of those edge cases if we want a standard to really address everyone's needs, Right? Yeah.
I mean, you're pointing exactly to that. These aren't just assets that you treat sort of the same with, I don't know, retention policies of the usual sort. It's more like they're representations of people and those people may not be around, but those representations may ha there may be cultural or religious or philosophical aspects to people's own choices about what they like to have happen and their family's choices.
Mike, you had an interesting example that you came across of a, a kind of a digital avatar that somebody created. Yeah.
You, you talk about, we've heard a lot about gen AI and LLMs, right? There was a, a gentleman back a couple years ago, his fiance died suddenly. That's all, all of our stories today start by the way. So just get used to that. She passed away suddenly and he could not get past her death. He was mourning for a year, year plus he read and Wired or some other magazine about this new technology that was coming out called GPT-3, maybe you've heard of it. It was very new back then. And a guy had set up a service where you could create your own chatbot and you pay a number of credits.
He paid a thousand credits in and then fed GPT-3, all of her tweets and all of her messages that had been sent to him, right. And started chatting with it. And it was enough like her that it actually helped him on one hand, right? It helped him move on.
She would, the, the chat bot would tell him, I think it's time for you to, to keep on going. And didn't say didn't need me, but it helped him process. Right? On the other hand, when those credits ran out, it built into the system was a limiter, a limitation that you couldn't extend the life of the bot. Even if you put in more credits, the seed values of the original foundational model would change enough that her personality, her personality would change.
So that was actually really helpful for him because otherwise, what's the ethical moral, moral danger here is that you could keep your loved one in a box as long as you wanted and trot them out and let them lead this Harry Potter like halflife, right? So there, there, it's, it's fascinating. There's The, the considerations are endless where there's a new effort that's just been launched to address some of the considerations. And this is, this is what Dean Sachs has done. He's working to start an open ID foundation group called Death in the Digital Estate.
And he started to charter this group so that we could, we can reason together about what to do next. And for starters, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you the URL, sorry, no slides, no QR codes here, but on GitHub, the DH DHS dash AWS is dean's space. And you can find his death in the digital estate or dad area where we're starting to collect resources and where we're working on a charter, which I believe he started with Chad, GBTI, I'd love to know from you guys, like, alright, there's an effort that's great for, for gathering people and getting the sort of neural network going.
What do you think might be the top thing that we should solve or, or discuss first in such a forum? Okay, I'm gonna name something that is adjacent.
It's, it's in the, in the lane, but it's more, a bit of more practical and sort of things we used to do with paper and now how do we do them with digital, which is our papers, right? Like Kim Cameron was a incredible thinker in the space. What is happening to his digital papers that tell some of the history of this industry? I'd argue the same with Vittorio. Some of the, so there's a kind of like, we had a tradition of people contributing their papers to libraries. You can do this in the digital world. I think it would be good to have a conversation about that.
It's sort of like a clear boxed conversation though. You know, there's a con, there's a thing called a fest shrift, which is done in the academic world, which is celebrating somebody by publishing a collection of their works. And I can imagine that'd be a wonder being a wonderful way to celebrate somebody after their passing.
Mike, do you have any thoughts? Yeah, quick side note, I'm doing a talk about gen AI and its impact on human authenticity tomorrow. The reason I mention it, it's only tangentially related, but at the end of that deck is the QR code and the URL. So you can go online and find that.
I, I think maybe my, my default is to rush and go find technical solutions, but I think I'm wary of that. I think maybe stating, and we've already have an attempt at it, but stating what our base principles are seems, seems like a, and getting consensus on that because I don't know if we have that yet. Like almost like a hippocratic do no harm, but the opposite do good. What does that mean in this situation? I'm not really Sure. That's a great suggestion.
I for one, endorse it. I love the kind of design principle approach. The why start with your why approach. Do we have any questions from the audience? Can I borrow a microphone real quick? Yeah. Thank you. In what extent do you consider like GDPR is purely for natural persons, so not once you are deceased, GDPR is not active anymore for that case. How do you see that as a risk or I gotta, I gotta take on that.
I mean this goes beyond privacy rights and I don't think that deceased people generally are counted as having privacy rights, but this is really much more, it should be about human rights of a much deeper sort and that needs to be sorted out because in the digital realm, I don't think we have good, good mappings. Another question?
Yeah, half question, half comment. I think the pope right, gets to choose whether his journals are made public or get burned, right? So I think there's an aspect here of having a conversation if you have the opportunity with the person to sort of like figure out what is their desire as it relates to, you know, the, the future and how should that happen?
It isn't, you know, just the family's choice. I think the, the, you know, if you get to have the conversation or in an environment where you, you can do that, I think there's a lot of practical things that are outside of technology that are a little bit like you were talking about clea, which is here are the things that you should do. Like don't get rid of the phone number, don't change the bank account, don't whatever, because you never know when you're gonna get a check made out to your loved one that you've gotta cash. And if they're no longer on the bank account, you can't cash it.
So maybe user-centric retention policies or something like that. Yeah, there's a Works Stuff like that. It could be, is really practical. It can be very helpful. And when they're doing this, keep in, keep in mind that when they're doing this, they're not necessarily in their right mind, right? It is an impaired user because of deep trauma. Probably the, the parallel here too is for people who exist today, you know, people are stealing it with gen ai, their, their image and their voice. It's kind of the logical equivalent.
Another flip side aspect that may be outta scope, I think is that if you are declared dead by your government and you are still alive, it's very hard to get that reversed. There's a talk at, at defcon where yeah, there's long story, but I'll tell you that later. So thank you all. We have one more question.
Yeah, one more here in the center for it and then we'll Let you Out to break. Yeah. Following on that actually I, a personal story, I had to go through a small procedure and then I was thinking, what if I don't come out of this procedure? So what I did, I sort of wrote all my passwords and everything on a piece of paper, addressed it to my brother and kept it in the, in the drawer and, and everybody, you know, my wife has access to that drawer.
So it's, it's sort of, you know, thinking that that way, you know, my, my cousin passed away probably six months, six months ago and they sent through his Instagram thing that now he sort of, you know, this guy passed away. So it's, it's important I think to actually write it down.
You know, you come to a realization that, hold on, we are not permanent here, so take care of, you know, what's, what's gonna happen. And on the banking sort of check the gentleman said, actually received something from bank that says do your KYC otherwise we'll shut down your bank account. So the bank accounts cannot be even permanent.
You know, it's, it's if you don't keep it going. But that's sort of my take on it. Thanks. Thank you for sharing that.
There's, you know, the Memento Maori concept, you know, when you have a reminder of your own mortality, it's a great reminder to go take care of some things. Yeah. I'll just add, there was a ton of questions that were surfaced in digital death day and there's a video actually in the resources page of Dade with the video, the talk that I gave. But one of the questions is what happens when there's more profiles of dead people online than live people online? And this hasn't happened yet, but it will.
And you know, that's a question like, We should save all these questions and I, you know, join the Dade group and contribute. 'cause I think it's gonna be very fertile. Thank you all.