Today, the world lacks a comprehensive set of consent-driven tools to allow individuals to determine how their digital data is handled upon their death or disablement.  Humans’ online presence and digital data is part of their “digital estate”, which includes writing, images, photographs, audio, video, code, and other digital artifacts stored locally or in the cloud by or on behalf of its owner. Although solutions do exist, such as legacy contacts on Apple or Facebook, they are not universal and must be individually configured per service provider, creating barriers to their broad usage.

The loss of control over one’s digital footprint can lead to misuse or abuse of the deceased’s likeness through the production of deepfakes using video, audio, and writing samples.  In some cases, the deceased’s accounts may be quickly removed from major platforms, leading to the loss of a thought leader’s writings.  Or, a social media platform may not recognize the death of the deceased, leading others to interact with the profile as if the user was alive.  None of these outcomes are desirable.

The proposed Death and the Digital Estate Community Group (DADE CG) will allow interested parties to develop the use cases to support an individual’s right to choose what happens to their digital data upon their death or disablement. All use cases must be broadly applicable to a global audience, respect global cultural and religious traditions, and consider the perspectives of users, their legacy contacts, and service providers.  The identified use cases will be leveraged to develop high level data flows to inform future protocol work. The DADE CG will not develop any protocols, nor will the CG develop any use cases that are well established in law or practice today, such as managing the deceased’s real property or monetary assets.

The long term vision beyond the proposed DADE CG is to establish a working group to develop protocols and guidance for service providers to enable users to manage their digital estates. The vision includes user-centric, centralized mechanisms for determining the handling of the user’s data, enabling both coarse and fine-grained controls to share, place data in escrow, delete data, delegate access to credentials/data/services in a way that protects the individual’s privacy rights.

By the end of Q3 2024 we expect to deliver a proposed charter to the OpenID Foundation Board for approval.

How can you contribute?  First, we need additional authors to help complete the DADE CG charter.  The GitHub repo may also be used to capture relevant resources to inform the future CG.  Second, join the DADE CG mailing list and Slack channel.  

Meetings have not yet been scheduled.  As the charter development continues we will schedule meetings as needed to resolve issues.