2025‐03‐21 Minutes - openid/death-and-the-digital-estate GitHub Wiki

2025-03-21 Agenda

  • Attendees
    • Eve Maler (Venn Factory)
    • Mike Kiser (Sailpoint)
    • Sean Miller (RSA)
    • George Fletcher (Practical Identity LLC)

2025-03-21 Agenda

  • Welcome and Antitrust Policy Reminder

  • Note Taker - Kiser

  • Agenda Bashing

  • Review recently shared articles and links

    • Thanatology course and more about thanatology

      • Eve: Fascinating area of study that I was unaware of
      • Kiser: these topics would be spread out among various courses of study within a university program

    • Blog on grief and death

      • Eve: might be worth taking a look or a read through

    • Book on Digital Afterlife -- book mentioned as part of the course readout linked above

      • Eve: book is related to the thanatology. I'd like to get up to speed on what's going on here. Death-bots, for instance, would be an interesting use case to explore/ creating an avatar
      • Kiser: looks like the authors are focused on AI / robotics and virtual humans
      • Eve: spoke at SXSW about this technology and how we're all "digital". SXSW - hand identity founder was at the conference, and was talking about licensing your likeness. ie - James Earl Jones liscenced his likeness for the public good. This is another branch of technology. There's a book from the publicity point of view...
      • George: I think that the interesting thing is "what are the rights ownerships?" in the context of work someone has created or performed after the fact.... The family tree becomes public after passing (geneaology, etc.) Are their harms if ownership rights are too strict? Or cover too much?
      • Eve: harms by making things too strict or too loose... a lot of data where multiple subjects are involved. DNA/ genetics / Golden Gate Killer - running down the bad guy via DNA... Consensus methods as to whether or not to disclose information...
      • George: ie - Should a deceased sibling have a voice in the consensus to what should happen in a family estate? If deceased, no voice in that situation.
      • Kiser: what about a digital avatar that exists after the real world person? do they get the say?
      • Eve: Legal systems will have to rule on this sort of thing. The easy case is "surviving siblings having a say..." Hard case - can you have permissions enforced on behalf of people who are no longer alive.... (did they register the opinion before they passed away? )
      • Sean: what if you gave an opinion predeath?
      • Eve: can you designate software to deal with not only humans giving consent, but also digital / virtual entities?
      • George: then couldn't you be able to sue the virtual entity?
      • Ian: We just bumped into what I wanted to talk about - liability and digital agent acting "on behalf of". Is there a shared root problem that we have not been able to solve: if I make a decision based on identity data that you gave me, who's responsible? If it's a digital agent that acts on my behalf, who do I sue? and how do I interact with that agent? We as a society have not had to demarcate risk, etc.
      • Eve: If there was a legal group (ABA?) working on this that would be good to know. Fiduciary duty, eg. The actual word is agency - to act on your behalf. The interactions start to enter the tech world, but the legal basis is intertwined deeply.
      • Kiser: We're going to use tech, tho, and then regulate it afterwards....

    • OSW (and eKYC) discussion on delegated authority and on-behalf-of

      • George: I was there at this discussion - I'll post a pdf into the slack group chat - summary from OSW and delegation patterns, etc. What are the components in delegated auth? (and how they might relate). Also talked about future oriented things that we don't have a good handle on today. One-time delegations, for instance, for a one-off delegation from a wallet....that capability doesn't exist today. We talked about parent / child delegations, etc. The use cases in the eKYC are fascinating - and the patterns of delegation are a good topic for discussion.

      • Eve: eKYC is a working group that's adjacent to our work. Resource rights administration is key ...Multi-id relationships is not a simple thing - and identity can't handle it very well at this point.

      • George: we did talk a bit about the lifecyle ... delegation authority ends when the child turns 18 (or of age) - how do you handle that tension...if incapacitated, then how does that delegation transition / change / modify.

      • Eve: I'll pay more attention, because we've been down this road before to some degree... state changes becoming actionable, for instance. If we can get a consensus framework from eKYC, we can use it to describe our usecases

      • George: no concrete conclusions, but I wondered if there wasn't some description that can capture the relationship - and then you can create policy on top of that relationship model. rules of delegation should likely be separated from the relationships itself.

      • Sean: We were originally focused on digital rights after death, and now we're talking about volition after passing (and how those are expressed.) Those are two different use cases. A lot have to do with digital transfer...

      • Eve: ai agent is coming up quickly ..

      • Sean: business continuity is key as well...

      • Kiser: digital transfer of assets is the most near term issue

      • George: my wife had access to all the subscriptions for supplemnts, etc - my options are : (1) log in as her or (2) delegated authority to cancel the subscription... Today we have zero way to present a delegated authority credential - that concept doesn't exist.

      • Eve: as we move away from static passwords , etc - we cannot let passkey sharing be the default.

      • George: if we solve the delegated auth credential, then it may solve the ai agent issue as well - you delegate to the agent as well.

      • Eve: How is eKYC talking about this? Where is delegated authority defined and how do you distinguish it from default document sharing vs "authority"? delegated authorization is pretty well known, but not delegated authority...

      • George: I think there is, we have the building blocks. Thinking about whether or not I write the "on behalf of " token or not...

      • Eve: Human case is the hard case. if we already have the semantics, then a lot of the work is in progress . . .

      • Eve: what should we do to facilitate the eKYC work? We haven't quite nailed the eKYC stuff? Can anyoe take an action item to help us be prepared to talk about it?

      • George / Eve - trying to get more involved in eKYC. Dr. Rachel had about 5 demos / use cases that she could share.... She could share and then we could see if there are patterns that might overlap

      • Eve: Can you share her contact info, George?

      • George: I'll try to start that process....

      • Kiser: I might create a diagram to guide use cases

      • Sean: I wonder if it's worth it updating to DADE to Digital Afterlife / Digital Estate...

      • Eve: chairs can comb through the content from github and the notes as well

      • Sean: the cultural appropriateness discussions might be helpful here

    • Research-based Digital Memory Box

    • Another alive person who reports trouble being declared dead

  • Capturing Use Cases - timeboxed to 10 minutes

    • Let's have a frank conversation about how this is going :)

  • Terminology and Cultural Sensitivity

    • Progress on intentions from last meeting?

  • External-Facing Activities

    • White paper progress

      • 3/28 is the draft for the proposal
      • Exec has to budget for the paper (wasn't allocated before)
      • priority on real-life guidance

    • Conference appearances status

    • Ian Update on speaker for DADE panel:

      • "To answer your question about presenting on digital assets at death, it sounds like a fun opportunity; however, I am fully booked on my maximum allotted speaking engagements for 2025. I can make some suggestions though! The top experts/presenters on this topic in my industry are:
      • Karin Prangley at Brown Brothers Harriman https://www.bbh.com/us/en/bbh-who-we-are/our-team/karin-prangley.html (although it looks like her firm has scrubbed her bio of her speaking on this topic, she used to do it all the time).
      • Suzanne Brown Walsh at Harris Beach Murtha https://www.harrisbeachmurtha.com/people/walsh-brown-suzanne/. She's probably the better choice but both are great!
      • Harris Beach Murtha
      • Brown Walsh, Suzanne
      • Suzy represents clients in the areas of estate and tax planning, particularly for families of children with special needs, elder law, estate and trust administration, trust modifications and trustee changes. Suzy is nationally known for her speaking and writing, including the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, the Southern Federal Tax Institute and numerous regional organizations throughout the country."

  • AOB

  • Previous Minutes (for reference)