Together with Michael E. Locasto \u201902<\/strong> and Mike Massimi \u201905<\/strong>, DePasquale has been thinking of ways to address this issue of \u201cdigital death\u201d by \u201cgracefully dealing with expired digital identities in a secure, privacy-preserving fashion.\u201d To start, the three scholars rounded up the terms of service information from variouse-mail, social, e-health, banking, and cloud services. It turned out that very few of them had policies in place for a user\u2019s death, and the minority that did specifically forbid transferring accounts to friends or family members. \u201cThere are some very basic mechanisms for account revocation or memorialization, but these are in their infancy,\u201d notes Locasto, an assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of Calgary. \u201cNo one that I know of deals with this in a single, coherent way across all services.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s an additional twist to the whole thing: rather than storing login credentials locally, the browser extension would forward them to a cloud storage service. Offered by third-party players including Apple and Amazon, cloud storage offers networked online storage through which data is stored in \u2028virtualized pools. \u201cWe\u2019re very excited about that idea,\u201d DePasquale says. \u201cWith the cloud infrastructure, we can scale up the computational power we need very quickly and easily if the [digital death] service becomes popular.\u201d<\/p>\n Last fall, Locasto presented the group\u2019s ideas at the New Security Paradigms Workshop in California. \u201cWe mostly \u2028focused on the technical aspects of designing an authentication and authorization system that allowed for such \u2018graceful\u2019 retirement of digital identity,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of enthusiasm existed for investigating this problem \u2028because it is a very good example of a \u2018usable security\u2019 problem.\u201d<\/p>\n DePasquale and Locasto are both quick to point out that their idea is still in its infancy. \u201cAt this stage, we\u2019re really in the preliminary exploration of just how large and complex the average digital identity is,\u201d Locasto adds. \u201cNever before has our species had this sort of recording capability. In many ways, a very tangible representation of our living selves can exist after death, [which presents] interesting questions about what it means to be human and what kind of interaction we can have with the past. Tom Riddle\u2019s diary [in Harry Potter] is only the beginning of these sorts of questions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As our lives become increasingly dominated by our login information, some scholars have started to question what happens to all those digital accounts when we\u2019re no longer around to manage them. TCNJ researchers have devised a way to address the issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":5360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,53,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-june-2012","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"death](\"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/iStock_000014514816Large.jpg\" "\\"iStock_000014514816Large\\"")
The solution, DePasquale says, could lie in a web browser extension that would store a user\u2019s digital information and retrieve it when he attempts to log on to a web site. The extension would also offer users the option to specify which aspects of their digital identities would be forwarded to each \u201cidentity beneficiary\u201d upon their death. \u201cWhat we envision is one centralized website that you can log onto and essentially list all of the important websites that you want to share with certain friends and family members after you pass,\u201d DePasquale adds. \u201cOur role would be to act as an intermediary to help automatically provide that information to your relatives.\u201d<\/p>\n