Deathswitch, which is based in Houston, has a different system for releasing the funeral instructions, love notes and "unspeakable secrets" it suggests you store with your passwords and account info. The company will regularly send you e‑mail prompts to verify that you're still alive, at a frequency of your choosing. (Once a day? Once a year?) After a series of unanswered prompts, it will assume you're dead and release your messages to intended recipients. One message is free; for more, the company charges members $19.95 a year.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1916317-2,00.html
But did you know there is an API for checking if someone is dead or not? It's called the Death Index API, provided by CDYNE against the US Govt Social Security Death Index. Using this API would negate the need for "e‑mail prompts to verify that you're still alive".
Although this is a morbid example, it's a good example of a Cloud API service which can be composed together with other Cloud and on-premises services into banking, credit card application, and insurance applications.
1 comments:
This is an issue that concerns all of us. Unless each of us sets up some avenue of redress in the case of our death we can leave some very unhappy individuals behind. I work for Footnote.com and we are an historical social networking site. You can take personal information and upload it to our site creating your own personal gallery that you control. However, if you do not leave your sign-in and password for someone then it might be difficult for them to gain control of that information. We would do due diligence in working with relatives to make sure that whatever information we had would be dealt with correctly. It would be much easier for those however that are left if these issues had been taken care of before our death.
This is an issue that has become much more aggressive because of technology and our information highways!
The History Man
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