Passing On Your Cloud

During my time at college, our small Davidson community (there are only around 1,700 students) was twice saddened by the death of fellow undergrads: Josiah Cameron (who would have been graduating this year) in April 2006, and then Jay Chitty (a fellow classmate of Taylor and myself) in December of the same year.  Like the rest of the college, I was sickened with grief — for their families, their friends, and for the sudden vanishing of such young and promising lives from the Earth.  But, when my shock had finally dissipated and I had come to terms with the reality of their passing, I had a fleeting (and admittedly somewhat morbid) thought.

What happens to your online presence when your physical one is no longer?  Intrigued, I visited their Facebook pages.  My mind was racing.  “What’s going to happen to all these wall comments that were accumulated over the years?  What about the comments people left for him on his Thanksgiving photos?  Who decides when it is time to close this account?  What’s the procedure?  Does it all just disappear?”

I’ll understand if you perceive these to be insensitive and petty questions in the face of such a tragic subject, and perhaps for the present times it is indeed a little irrelevant.  But if you are paying even the smallest bit of attention to what is happening in technology, you are certainly aware of two things.  First, more and more of your personal “effects” — e-mail, photos, documents, music — are being turned into 1’s and 0’s and kept online.  Second, the tiny actions we take online (like leaving comments or clicking the “like” button on a Facebook news feed item) are little pieces of a larger online narrative that, in a sense, journal our lives for us.  If determining the fate of this data once we’re gone is not a crucial question to address right now, it certainly will be in the next two to three years.

Take your personal e-mail, for example.  E-mail has succeeded letter writing as a principal form of communication among most people of my generation.  My grandmother has letters from my grandfather when he was fighting in Guam, and I wouldn’t doubt that my parents have a few keepers stashed in a shoebox somewhere.  But most of the written missives that are important to me are either archived somewhere in my Gmail account, or stashed in a folder of PDF’d e-mails that I saved from my old college e-mail account.

Touching emails from friends in far away places, notes of encouragement or praise from professors, love letters sent to old girlfriends, my first e-mail back from Google telling me they wanted to interview me… if I were to die today, what would be the fate of these messages?  Would they sit in my account for a year or two until it was deactivated due to inactivity, eventually deleted to make way for more messages among the living?  Would someone know to go into my computer and save that PDF file?  Would I have been prescient enough to stash my password somewhere for my survivors to find it, or to include instructions in a will or elsewhere detailing if (and unto whom) I wanted that data to be bequeathed?

E-mail is the most pressing example, but in the coming years there will be more.  What about my photos?  What about my data from the del.icio.us bookmarking system, an equivalent to a drawer full of newspaper clippings?  What if I was the only writer of this blog and the sole owner of its content, the domain name, the hosting space, etc?  What if I had a private blog that acted as my journal?  The day is coming when the web will no longer be a duplicate or backup of the content on our computers.  Quite the opposite: on that day, our hard drives will be caches or backups for our web-based data.  If you think it’s slightly unnerving that your entire music, photo, and document collection are one drink spill away from destruction, wait until all that stuff is actually stored hundreds of miles away from you.

As more and more of our creativity, our work product… in short, our “stuff” becomes digital by its very nature, it’s going to be important for us to think about a plan for preserving and passing it on to our loved ones.  The tricky thing is that the web is littered with our digital footprints, and in many cases we’ve changed boots for every site we’ve visited.  If I were to sit you down with a pad of paper away from your computer, could you list every site that you belonged to along with your username and password?  Could you even name ten of them without referring to your bookmarks, or checking your browser history, or relying on those convenient auto-fill functions that take care of your security info for you?

The good news is that there is a movement across the industry to help consolidate our identities and our data.  Fancy things like Google Account Authentication API, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, OAuth, OpenID, FriendFeed are all trying to help you either connect the dots you’ve left across the web, or to help you suck those dots into one central point of aggregation.  But that’s only half the battle.  The other half is making sure that people think about what they want kept (and what they want deleted) when they’re gone… and that they’ve told the right people and written the right instructions for their wishes to be properly executed by their survivors.

None of this is meant to suggest that your data is not secure, of course — I do work for a cloud computing company, after all!  And a lot of the burden is on the companies like Google to provide the right tools and procedures to let you make these decisions.  But you also have a burden to be the master of your domain and the planner of its fate, and your domain is becoming more and more digital by the second.

It’s questions like these that make me excited about technology.  The more useful and innovative something is, the more riddled with legal and even philosophical puzzles it generally tends to be.  And in this age of wildfire innovation, the puzzles just keep on coming.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Salinas Photography.