Today Google released its new Inactive Account Manger allowing users to now specify what should happen to their account data once they stop using Google. This is the first offering from a major service provider to proactively ask users to specify their wishes before death.

The new feature works like this:

1. You specify a waiting period of inactivity for three, six, nine or twelve months.
   
2. You specify your wishes in the form of contacts to notify, contacts to receive access to your data or a directive to delete your account data.
3. One month before the waiting period is almost over, Google contacts you via email or text message.
4. If you do not respond the waiting period expires and your wishes are carried out.

Google’s tool allows you specific control of what happens to the data for each of your Google products. You can specify up to ten contacts to receive a copy of your data once you’re gone and select the specific products they gain access to. For example, you might send your Gmail data to your wife, but choose to send your YouTube data to a business partner. Once notified, your contacts then have three months to download your data.

You can also set up an aut0-responder email for incoming Gmail messages or direct that your account be deleted entirely.

This feature rolled out as a part of Google Account Settings and can be used by all Google accounts, except those managed through Google Apps for Business.

Update: An earlier version of this post indicated that account access might be granted using this tool. Upon further review, this tool only allows a download of your data and not access to the account.

What happens to your email, Facebook page and other digital property when you die? Naomi Cahn of the George Washington University School of Law, and our own Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife,” talk to Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour about the legal and ethical quandaries of dealing with a loved one’s digital assets after they’re gone.

Adding to the list of states that have passed laws pertaining to digital estates, the Virginia Legislature passed HB 1752 today affording parents of deceased minors access to their social media accounts. The bill’s description reads:

Powers of personal representatives; digital accounts. Provides that the personal representative of a deceased minor has the power to assume the deceased minor’s terms of service agreement with an Internet service provider, communications service provider, or other online account service provider for the purposes of consenting to and obtaining the disclosure of the minor’s digital assets. The provider shall provide the personal representative with access to the minor’s digital assets within 30 days from the receipt of a written request from the personal representative and a copy of the deceased minor’s death certificate.

While this law is only limited to minors, it represents a growing trend amongst consumers to take more control of their data. HB 1752 is a testament to the work of Ricky Rash, who took up the issue after his son Eric took his own life without any explanation. Rash hopes that Eric’s Facebook account will hold the some answers for him.

Rash told NBC 29, ”When you’re searching for answers and you’re hurting and you’re grieving, you need access, and you need some level of comfort that you’ve done everything you can to honor your loved one’s life.”

HB 1752 now goes to the governor’s desk for signature.

Here’s an excellent overview of why digital estate planning is important, how digital media is affected and the what you can do to plan ahead. If you only have two minutes, this news story from WXYC in Detroit is a good place to start.

Recollect, a new California-based startup of three former Flickr employees, launched into public beta on October 25th promising to archive everything you do online. The service, which first made waves on the Internet with its archive of Tweets from the wildly popular XOXO Festival, allows users to collect their social media activity into one downloadable archive. The service currently supports Flickr, Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare and offers plans ranging from $6 – $24 monthly, depending upon how many photos users want to archive. A one-month, free trial is available, however users must offer their billing information when they sign up.

At our SXSW panel this year, Bill LeFurgy commented that the “killer app” in the personal archiving space would be one that automatically captures our digital media and curates it for us automatically. Considering Recollect’s archive capability paired with its engaging design, perhaps this is just what the personal archiving community has waited for.

The folks over at Life Insurance Finder put together this great infographic, Step By Step Expert Guide To Protect Yourself Online Before You Die. With advice from me and Nate Lustig, formerly of Entrustet, now SecureSafe, the infographic defines digital assets, presents the various digital estate planning services, and discusses how to leave a digital legacy. Check it out.

Copyright infringement in the digital afterlife. Hilarious.

The following is from the official announcement:

ZURICH, Switzerland, April 17, 2012 – DSwiss, founders of SecureSafe, the leading online data safe service, announces today the acquisition of US-based digital estate planning service Entrustet. The acquisition will strengthen DSwiss’ footprint within the US market and provide them with additional end users.

The Entrustet service allows people to quickly, easily and securely prepare the last wishes for their digital assets and is a complement to SecureSafe’s existing data inheritance features. By consolidating the two companies, SecureSafe (formerly known as DataInherit) becomes the premier service for offering high security data storage both now and for the future.

Since launching in 2008, Entrustet has built-up relationships with estate planning attorneys who integrate digital assets into clients’ estate plans throughout the US which will prove invaluable to DSwiss as it strives to expand into the US market. Currently, the SecureSafe service has attracted many US customers who appreciate the benefits of Switzerland’s well-known privacy and data protection policies.

Commenting on the acquisition, Christian Schwarzer, CEO of DSwiss said: “The acquisition of Entrustet accelerates our strategy in several important ways – it extends our reach into the US market and also shows our business partners, investors and other competitors that we plan to stay at the top of this market.”

Nathan Lustig, Co-founder of Entrustet, added: “We are delighted that Entrustet will be incorporated into SecureSafe’s impressive service and know our customers will enjoy SecureSafe’s enhanced features.”

All existing Entrustet customers will be able to transfer their data to a SecureSafe account where they will not only benefit from the data inheritance features but also the invaluable file and password safes that can be accessed at anytime and anywhere via a PC or the services’ free iPhone and iPad apps.

Another SXSW has come and gone. Now that I’m back home and in withdrawal from the breakfast tacos, brisket and free drinks, I took a moment to reflect on my panel, Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death. Speaking at SXSW is always a thrill, and this year was no exception.

My goal with the panel was to provide a more advanced discussion of how we might interact with our digital heirlooms in the future. I’d grown weary presenting the usual cautionary tale about digital estate planning and I believed it was time for a look into the future. I think we did just that.

Panelists Bill LeFurgy, Adam Ostrow, Richard Banks, Airdrie Miller and Evan Carroll.

I’m deeply grateful that Airdrie Miller, widow of blogger Derek Miller from Penmachine.com, agreed to join us. In her “turn of the century love story” she captured the essence of our shift to digital and through her experiences with Derek’s untimely death helped us to understand just why our digital lives are so important. But in a moment of balance, she also shared how sometimes Derek’s memory, while extremely important to her, shouldn’t be a daily reminder. The process of grieving, it seems, needs resolution and putting things away, be they digital or physical, is necessary.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, inspired by Derek Miller’s final post, shared his thoughts on a digitally preserved self. Someday the massive quantities of digital information we create and share today combined with advances in artificial intelligence and shear computational power might give us a realistic representation of self. This idea is a very real possibility and was the central theme for our panel discussion. Should we create a digitally preserved self? And what form might that take?

Getting down to details, Bill LeFurgy from the Library of Congress reminded us of our personal archiving habits, or more appropriately, our lack thereof. Through his story of “Uncle Dave,” one of the many Civil War photographs in the Library of Congress collection, he pointed out that in the future we won’t look to institutions to find record of our personal history, but to our personal collections. If we’re to consider the idea of a digitally preserved self, then we must take better care of our personal collections and ensure they have the appropriate metadata or annotations to convey the meaning of objects to people or computers in the future.

Richard Banks of Microsoft Research Cambridge and author of The Future of Looking Back, examined the difference between the physical and the digital, and the tradeoffs of shifting out sentimental objects from one to the other. Richard pointed out that our most sentimental objects aren’t necessarily secondary to the mundane ones, which will help others understand our lives from the day-to-day minutiae we now can preserve.

Through our panel discussion we generated a few themes:

•  Today we create a massive amount of digital content, from the profound to the mundane.
• All of this content does indeed have value, regardless of our current perspective.
• As a society, we’re not good stewards of our own data through benign neglect.
• The tools of the future must have archiving tools built-in, automating the curation process to ensure that our personal data isn’t neglected.
• However we look back at the past, whether through a digitally preserved self, or through new interfaces, designers must understand how individuals reminisce, how they reflect and to what degree the past is welcome in their everyday life.

As an archivist at heart, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that we can save everything and build tools to take care of it and perhaps we will be able to do that after all. As we design these systems, however, we must understand and embrace how humans interact with the past and maintain a proper balance of the present. If we violate this relationship, the past will be a burden on the present, and our personal identities will fade away.

More from our panel

• Slides from the panel
• Review from Amber Lindholm from Frog Design
• Overview of Bill LeFurgy’s presentation

At the beginning of my SXSW “Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity” panelist Bruce Duncan of the Terasem Foundation told me, “human beings were built to connect with other people” and that instinct gets extended to his robot, Bina48. He also told me the moment that we take the cover off of Bina48, that the audience won’t be interested in the panelists anymore. They’ll only want to talk to “her”.

I had no idea how right he was.

Bina48 is an animatronic bust of a woman, with servos, cameras, microphones, and speakers. Everything runs into a PC tower. Recorded sound is translated to text and fed into a system that generates a response, which is “spoken” through the robot. The end result is a robot that can have a basic conversation with you. Yes, Bina48 is an interesting project, but after finding out how she works, I began to understand why the computer responded as it did. And in the end I’m not half as intrigued by her as I am the response by homo sapiens in the room.

The audience projected their own humanity onto her at every opportunity. Their questions, doubts, fears, and dreams. I began to see the session more as a view into the human psyche than the computer’s computations. You could feel the thirst that people have to find out the meaning of life’s big questions that lie, mostly unanswered, just beneath the surface. We can’t think about those questions all the time or it would drive us nuts. But when confronted with something as startlingly different, yet strangely identifiable as Bina48, those questions surface – immediately. The audience asked her questions like, “what is the meaning of life” “what are your goals” and “do you love?” The answers were met by laughs and gasps, by everyone, me included.

As the excitement wears off, I am left with a contemplative feeling. I’m thankful to Bruce for lugging 60 pounds of robot to Austin. It provided a much needed opportunity to dust off those unanswered questions and revel in the mystery of life.