When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?

Personally, I enjoyed most this comment from the bottom of that article:<p><i>So let's get this straight; you don't trust your wife, you think your daughter will grow up to be a nut job, and you're worried that your close friends will turn against you. Man, I'd just hand it all over now. It sounds like you have nothing to live for anyway.</i><p>Maybe this should be a unit test for whether you are ready to marry somebody. If you can't bring yourself to trust them with your password - and trust them not to use it - you have commitment issues. :-)

This is such a non-issue I really don't understand why it keeps coming up. Write your passwords down and store them with your <i>other</i> vitally important documents like your checks, bank account records, passport, etc. Why make it so complicated?

Gosh, why go to all this trouble? Just have an unnecessary heart valve transplant, and have the doctor inscribe your password on the new valve. Then develop a serious booze-and-sodium problem (I guess margaritas are the most efficient way to do this) until you absolutely cannot live without that last remaining valve. At that point, nobody can access your password until you're dead. Or, at least, once someone can access your password, you're definitely dead, which is more or less the same thing.

Just make a program that takes a password, and then (if correct) sends two emails: One to your box, and then (a day later) one to whomever you're leaving your data to. Tell them the password and then if they use it before you're dead, you have a day to change everything.

Hmm.. I see he missed on something BIG time.<p>How will his data persist if he is not paying the bills for hosting, Amazon S3 and so on. His legacy might not live up a few months after death.<p>I think this is a serious issue. What you blog and write today wont exists after you unless you are a company. Soon I'll post an idea soon on aleveo.com for this, be sure I'll post back on HN. Securing the data is the easy part given it is persisted.

Interesting, this seems to be the result of this post on BoingBoing: <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/05/27/what-will-happen-to.html" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2009/05/27/what-will-happen-to.html</a><p>I liked Jacob Appelbaum's reply best: <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/05/27/what-will-happen-to.html#comment-504039" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2009/05/27/what-will-happen-to.html#co...</a>

I've always wondered about this, and one of the ideas I've been playing with my head is the distributing the keys between a few people, and if something were to happen, they can combine them to unlock my secret (all the keys must be present)<p>SECRET xor KEY_A xor KEY_B xor KEY_C xor KEY_D = PUBLIC<p>This is kind of lame, but the same principle...

Interesting analysis of a problem that I don't have. Either I'm not nearly as paranoid as I should be, or I just don't feel like anything of value that I will be handing over to my heirs (whoever they turn out to be) will be digital in form. They'll get a chunk of cash and a bunch of computers with open source software on it.

I'll just get my passwords surgically implanted. sounds easier, and cheaper than dealing with all the lawyers. sheesh.

I've thought about this and wondered if it would be possible to create an escrow service that would only give over the key when say an official death certificate is presented or something like that.

It seems to me that the kinds of people who have data requiring this amount of security usually have a lot of other people working for them on just that task.

<a href="http://legacylocker.com/" rel="nofollow">http://legacylocker.com/</a>