Tag: Applications (page 14 of 19)

Do you want to send a farewell message to a loved one after you die?  Perhaps you live alone, and want to make sure someone finds you if you die?  Death Switch might be what you need. Death Switch is a simple site.  After you register, Death Switch will start sending you e-mail messages (at a frequency of your choosing).  If you don’t respond to one of those messages, Death Switch assumes that you’re dead, and sends out an email message that you’ve created, to an email address of your choosing.

You also tell Death Switch how frequently to check in with you to make sure that you’re alive (from 1 day, to 240 days), and how long Death Switch should give you to respond before it sends out your email from beyond the grave, or goes into "Worry Mode."  With "Worry Mode," you specify how often and with what frequency Death Switch should re-prompt you.  In the Worry Mode settings, you can also enter a secondary email address, and the email of a trusted friend to contact if you don’t respond.  You "deathswitch" email then will be sent at the end of the worry period.

The obvious concern over a service like this has to do with using it to transmit personal information, such as account passwords or details (if, for example, you wanted to give someone else access to accounts after you die).  You could get around this, I suppose, by describing the password in a way that only the recipient would understand, such as "my password to the safe filled with $1 million is the name of that slope where we skied off the cliff, followed by the number of the interstate we took to get there."

The basic version of Death Switch is free, and allows you to create one message to be emailed to one recipient when you die.  A premium subscription costs $19.95 per year, and allows you to send 30 messages, with up to 10 recipients for each message, with file attachments.

Can you think of how you might use a service like Death Switch?