Thread: Rest in Peace?
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Old 24 Apr 2012, 03:58 AM   #16
kijinbear
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: ~$
Posts: 652
Interesting topic. My answer is that I don't care.

Anyone I care about in my offline life will find out soon enough if I'm gone. Whoever is in charge of settling my affairs will be able to take my death certificate to a physical branch of my bank to retrieve any money I may have left. No need to leave them with my online banking password. They'll have enough clues already, like my bank card and all those paper statements lying around at my home.

MP3 files? Seriously? I'm not even sure if it's legal to pass them on as an inheritance, since technically I don't own them. I just obtained permission from the copyright holder to listen to them from time to time, and that license is usually not transferable. Stupid DRM. In any case, it's not like my hard drive dies with me. (Unless it's destroyed in the same accident that kills me, in which case it's gone anyway.)

E-mail accounts will eventually reach their inactivity limit (or expire if paid) and get deactivated. If Google is going to reveal them to anyone who presents them with a death certificate, that's just one more reason to stay away from Google. Kudos to Yahoo for sticking to principles. I wonder what other providers' take on the issue is.

The idea is that if I wanted anybody to know something I said in an e-mail, I would have made it known, e.g. by forwarding it to them. If there was something I wanted to keep private in life, it's most likely because it's nobody else's business. It won't suddenly become their business just because I stopped functioning.
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