By Dean H. Saxe

I am happy to announce the formation of the Death and the Digital Estate Community Group (DADE CG).  DADE CG has been created as a space for the OpenID Foundation and identity community to develop an understanding of how individuals can manage their digital estate in the event of disablement or death.

Before we dive deep into DADE, the problem space, and the outputs of DADE - all of these things will come in the next few weeks - I want to share some history of how I found myself working on this passion project.  In November 2010, a close friend of mine passed away unexpectedly.  His passing rocked my world. We were close in age - both under 40 - with young children and plans for the future.  Our plans to climb Mt. Rainier together never came to pass.    

In the following months and years, I spent a lot of time thinking about death and how I, and others, could manage our credentials for online services in order to allow our friends and family to gracefully manage our digital footprint after death.  Initially, I spent time considering a dead man’s switch - a mechanism that would release access to a set of credentials to a defined individual or individuals after a fixed period of time where the owner didn’t check in to the service. The solution seemed unwieldy and impractical.  

I let this idea sit on the back burner for years.  In those intervening years my career moved into the realm of identity.  

As I saw the rise of stronger authentication factors, and a move toward digital identity documents such as mDLs, the issue became more pressing.  In 2022, recognizing the inevitability of passkeys and the impact that passkeys would have on the ability of family and loved ones to gain access to their deceased loved one’s accounts it became clear we had to resolve this gap.

In 2022 at EIC in Berlin, Germany came a late night conversation with Andrew Shikiar, Khaled Zaky, Tim Cappalli, and Vittorio Bertocci.  I shared my crazy idea, we discussed the issue earnestly and agreed that action was needed.  Tim - in a way that only Tim could - named it “Dean’s Death Service”.  Life happened and, yet again, this idea remained on the back burner.

Nearly 18 months later at Authenticate 2023 and Internet Identity Workshop XXXVII, with the identity community still mourning Vittorio Bertocci’s passing, I leaned on the community to help move the idea of DADE into real action.  People shared with me stories of their friends and loved ones’ difficulties managing the deceased’s digital estate.  Others shared their own methods for trying to preserve their digital estates in advance of their passing.  

I’ll be honest - I’m not comfortable with talking about death.  I’m not sure most of us are.  As identity practitioners, it is up to us to define the use cases, the risks, the privacy implications, and - most importantly - the benefits of standardized mechanisms to allow individuals to choose how their digital estate is managed during disablement or after death.  The work we do enables the systems that power modern identity.  We must consider how that identity persists in a digital form after death.

Finally, I must extend my appreciate and gratitude to the people who helped make this a reality: Ian Glazer, Mike Kiser, Kaliya Identity Woman Young, Arynn Crow, Nishant Kaushik, George Fletcher, Gail Hodges, Teresa Wu, Pamela Dingle, Tim Cappalli, Andrew Shikiar, Khaled Zaky, Eve Maler, Andi Hindle, Jeremy Grant. Thank you all for the discussions, stories, feedback, that helped get DADE CG off the ground..  

Welcome to the Death & the Digital Estate Community Group.  Over the next few weeks I’ll take care of background administrivia to get the group bootstrapped.  Please join the DADE CG mailing list to keep up with the latest information about DADE CG.  I look forward to our shared work!

About the OpenID Foundation