Let’s say one morning you wake up and you’re dead.
Google has your emails for the past decade, your YouTube videos, your Google Voice account, your Google Wallet, your search history, your Adsense account, your building models for Google 3D, your Chrome account with your bookmarks.
Your relatives show up to bury your corpse and split up your st00f. What’s a Google to do at this point? Is it up to a judge? What if five years ago in an email you called your mother in law a shrew? Is your email private after you die? What if the need to find the pass code that opens your vault of gold bars?
Surely as more and more Googlers cease to operate nominally, this becomes more and more of a distraction to Google. Today Google made an attempt to address this
http://m.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-releases-tool-to-deal-with-your-data-after-death/2013/04/11/463e09a4-a2d3-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html
If you’re dead though, do you really care? If someone close to you dies, would you read their email?
It’s actually the escalator companies that have us by the ahem.. “throat”. My mall has no warning signs to warn me or other shoppers not to use them this way. Those sneaky bastards can rot in hell but not until we sue sue sue. 😉
http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2013/04/12/escalator-strangles-man-to-death-after-clothes-get-caught/
I still have my parent’s personal records and have read them. I’ve thought about sensitive records of mine to be destroyed before my death. Of course it depends on whether I’m able to do it should some horrible accident or illness leave me incapacitated. Good questions.
Many people may come to regret putting so much of their personal lives online. The facts and details about ourselves are still going to be around for a long time even if, or when, we deactivate all accounts. The story CC1s121LrBGT posted in the Gold Confiscation blog about the data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah tells us a lot about our government. All phone calls coming in to the US are being transcribed and saved. There are Fusion Centers across America. The government and corporate interests collect all sorts of data on everyone.
Soon, if it is not already being done, people will be arrested, accused and detained for having the ‘wrong’ thoughts. No phone call to your attorney, no notification to your family or friends, no trial by jury of your peers, nothing.