Last week a family member (Kebab John as he was known to his friends and family) died.

He was pretty young, 43, and spent a lot of time on-line, social networking that sort of thing. Now, of course, he doesn’t do that any longer as he is in the great ‘data center in the sky’.

During his funeral, yesterday, it occurred to me that he would have had many sets of logon’s credentials to the various sites he frequented. This persistence of being in the virtual world when your real world person dies will become more and more prevalent as we become more and more likely to be digitally native.

Digital versions of John are now floating about in cyberspace like a headless ghost or a dog without an owner. I’m not sure if John had shared these credentials with any of his immediate family (such as my niece or great nephews) but if he didn’t, then they are there to stay, for a long while, at least.  It occurred to me that as our digital identity becomes ever more sophisticated and gives us ever more access to on-line (and offline) resources that we should have some sort of mechanism for allowing those identities to die with us. True we could rely on family and friends to delete them for us – but how many of your (no doubt myriad) of digital credentials do you share with others?  

Identities such as digital certificates do have a life span (usually a year) but that’s a long time to allow the potential for someone to use that ID, say if the PC of the deceased is sold on. I think that Information Cards could be the solution.  We need a mechanism to allow the identity to die with us, or to be released onto a family member by some sort of system like a digital will so they can use it to let our digital world know about our demise. I think that a Relationship Card linked to a web service (perhaps government run) that could update the Card details might be the answer, then at least you would have a link to the real world and give family members the option to control and shut down the deceased’s on-line accounts – and protect the family from potential fraud at a time when they can least deal with it…just a thought.