2025‐06‐13 Minutes - openid/death-and-the-digital-estate GitHub Wiki

  • Attendees

    • Dean H. Saxe (self)
    • Sean Miller (RSA)
    • George Fletcher (Practical Identity LLC)
    • Mike Kiser (SailPoint)
    • Robert Friedman (Permanent Legacy Foundation, Permanent.org)
    • Victor Lu (self)
    • Jean Kaplansky

  • Note taker: Sean Miller

  • Welcome and antitrust policy reminder

  • Upcoming meetings

    • 2025-06-25 3:00 PM PDT (GMT-9)

  • Agenda bashing? Dean - called for other topics. no new topics raised

  • Australian DADE Group

    • Meetings are held 9 AM Eastern Australia Time every other Friday
      • Next meeting date is June 27, 2025
      • Contact Linden Dawson for information Dean - Encouraged others to join and understand some of the unique issues to that country related to DADE

  • Review recent articles / links posted in Slack

    • https://fortune.com/2025/05/29/exclusive-empathy-raises-72-million-series-c-to-tackle-the-agonizing-logistics-of-death/ George - Raised some of the questions around how the information may be used (things like contacting Medicare on behalf of you). Brings up a lot of questions or checklist around information to gather so it is available to executors. Wouldn't it be great if you just entered the information and AI or some other entity handles terminating things, the processes and contacts to close out accounts. There are many dependencies and timing around closing accounts, keeping money in trust to cover that automation could really help. Dean - Maybe this is what empathy is doing? Jean - Empathy has content on working through the grief and how to go through probate and working with your loved ones. Definitely see the need this company is filling to help identify the things you didnt think of or give you access to resources that are hard to find on your own. Dean - asked Jean to write up a short review of what Empathy is and how she used it Jean - it is social services in an app plus some legal advice Dean - had questions about how closure of credit cards or activity is frozen. is that anyone's experience? George - not my experience. the cards are still open (just frozen). highlights some of the security challenges - no death certificate asked for, no card closure happened Jean - i was able to freeze credit cards but not close. the card company in this case did ask for a death certificate. A lot of issues if you live in a different state than you are administrating the estate of Dean - this highlights a lot of the difficulties in trying to do the right thing to clean things up. Clearly we need better tools to unwind the digital assets

  • https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/how-to-draft-a-will-to-avoid-becoming-an-ai-ghost-its-not-easy/ Dean - article highlights the technical aspects of how to right a will to avoid someone creating an AI representation of you in the future. Interesting and forward thinking. Article talks about a bot that was created based one user's perception of the relationship with his father and may be incomplete with how others saw him. George - Came up at Identiverse. Sibling's relationships with parents can be very different and depending on who the executor is may shape some digital afterlife incompletely based on individual's experiences. Not sure how you do this to be more complete Mike - seeing some trends with personalized bots to a single living being. Big difference between real relationship (messy) versus personal theraphy (better defined) almost Sean - i wonder what use cases people are seeing for creating ai bots beyond personal grief theraphy Jean - there are different use cases now where people are creating their own representations before death to increase scalability (where you can be) as well as longevity. Acts like a digital twin Mike - people that are terminally ill may create a bot to exist after their death to preserve their memories Sean - I was solely thinking of ai bots created posthumously by survived loved one. Dean - A way to self perpetuate yourself into the future beyond your death George - A way to continue/have a legacy. Almost like a foundation set up to continue things you believed in or preserves things you were passionate about Robert (chat) - I am not able to speak on this call without having my attention annoyingly diverted mid-commentary. So I’ll drop a text comment here. I think people are over-indexing on the value of a “bot” and missing the actual problem of legacy: digital preservation. If you can reliably control, migrate, and preserve your digital footprint, then not only will the materials be more easily acceptable and understood by the inheritors BUT it also makes it possible to train whatever models in whatever way they want in the future where the “AI” technology of this moment has become a relic of the past.

    • See new temporary repository of resources and links in HackMD - to be moved to our wiki Dean - talked to resources link Eve has created in hackmd to the wiki - https://github.com/openid/death-and-the-digital-estate/wiki/Resources . It is read only access except for co-chairs so please file an issue if you want to add/change the content Jean - how do i add content for the Empathy use case Dean - Enter as a pull request

  • Planning Guide for Cyber Security Awareness Month - Next Steps

    • Dean authored a first draft outline for the planning guide
      • Review draft outline - everyone please check it out! ^^
      • Identify areas for improvement, volunteers to produce PRs
      • Review Open Issues for CyberSecAwarenessMonth Dean - call to others to help pick up some of the open issues and the draft outline Dean - planning to show up on a podcast in October beside the release of the planning guide. Found some contacts at Google that deal with legacy planning

  • AOB