Will Knott

I wrote about Information Loss and Death back in January. At the time I wondered about messages from beyond the grave.

Shortly afterwards, Darryl Ohrt, posted a beautiful but tragic advert highlighting just such a case (embedded below).

The advert for the Australian Cure For Life Foundation actually hurts to watch. I’m honestly advising against watching it.

The film created by DDB Sydney and Filmgraphics shows the heartache of a mother with Brain Cancer knowing she won’t live long enough to be with her baby daughter as she grows older. In the advert she leaves messages for her daughter.

While writing about the information loss aspect of death I wondered if, upon confirmation, that a message should be distributed to “friends” of the deceased in that social network. Marcus MacInnes of Pix.ie explained

[the] moral issue which until your question, we had not fully considered. How would friends react to receiving an on-line message from someone whom they knew had recently died. We cannot assume that the custodian of the account would act in any given manner and it is not clear whether or not we have a moral responsibility to provide reasonable protection to our users from receiving messages via our platform which are likely to cause distress. An example of this may be when a custodian acts irresponsibly, either intentionally or unintentionally.

The problem of course is that there is no easy way to tell someone that you aren’t going to be coming home. That you won’t see them again. If its hard during break-up, imagine what its like when its unavoidable. All I can think of is the impersonal. “This profile is now in memorial state.” Then let the inquirers ask.

take care,
Will

Since I first blogged about the 4d’s of information loss, I have a few updates.

Source: WikipediaFirstly, what happens to your social network account matters financially. The Irish tax authorities are keeping an eye on Facebook and LinkedIn. And depending on what happens on your account may effect you being audited. In the case of a nasty divorce… its possible to create fake announcements which just might lead to an audit.

In the case of a death, LinkedIn will…

“attempt to gather as much information to make sure that the claim is legitimate. [They] take our members privacy very seriously. Once [they] have sufficient evidence [they] can remove the account. Unfortunately there is no notification that goes out to all of their contacts.”

This apparent network might not even be a true reflection of who-knows-who. Jaiku Invites is an example of this. When Google bought Jaiku they shut down new user registrations. There are a lot of people out there who would love to join and take part in all the great discussions we have there, particularly around events like OpenCoffee and BarCamps. Luckily each existing member was given 10 invites that they could hand out and Ciarán Rooney created a method to do this. However this means that the inviter does not know the invitee despite the apparent connection made. (And hello to those strangers who used my invites).

And it is still easy to loose the information by, loosing the laptop. Just ask the UK government who lost over 1,000 laptops (full of information) over the last few years.

I do have a death update, but that is something for a post of its own.

take care,

Will