it has been quite some time since i’ve posted to this blog so why not start with a post about death…

death switch is a service which sends out emails of your choosing – after you die. you can be a polite internet citizen and unsubscribe to all those mailing lists and newsletters which you will no longer read. you can freak out friends by sending them mail after they’ve attended your funeral. you can say goodbye to those in an online community who are wondering why you’ve suddenly gotten so quiet. you can send family members passwords to accounts and even tell them where that secret treasure is buried.

but when will the service begin to update your facebook / twitter status? when does it post a farewell message to youtube and your blog? or whatever technology we’ll be using by that time.

how does death switch know you’re dead? periodically it sends your email address a message. if you reply to that email, it knows you’re alive. if you do not reply, it sends you more messages over x period of time (you control the time frames) and if you don’t reply to any of them, the system assumes you are dead (or in a coma / critically injured). the sample email on their website shows they attempt to contact you 10 times within a little over a month before they send your emails although the info on the site suggests you can change this to a year.

i like the idea of being able to tie up loose ends as well as send that final message but the current product offering is very limited in terms of how many emails & recipients you can contact. the service only sends 1 batch of emails too… you can’t schedule emails to go x amt of time after your death. pricing is $19.95 per year for 30 emails. that won’t cover most people’s fb friend lists.

i’m also not quite sure about how they validate your death but i haven’t logged in to see how complete the settings are. the site doesn’t have any information about the company so at this stage there is zero trust the company will still be around when you die or the security of your information.

would you use the service? how would you use it?

via lifehacker

it seems aol screwed up and let a database of search queries go public. 21 MILLION search queries have been revealed all attached to a unique ID number which means 658k of its users search histories are now public.

read the c-net article i linked to about the data for a fascinating look at how well we could be tracked, how so not private our activities are and aol’s screw up (different link – aol apologises)

i have to say this is a lot more fascinating than reality shows like big brother. i wonder how long until there’s a tv show which tracks a person’s search queries and then shows up on their doorstep to question them about it. or perhaps tie in with sponsors and show up with their fav things.

and you can go to aol search logs to create that tv show or begin your stalking career.