Feature Requests for Death
FB14170572: Add “Date Deceased” field to Contact records
When I worked on iTunes, we briefly discussed inheriting purchased music, but we didn’t build anything for it. Product teams may never prioritize legacy-related features because they’re not glamorous. But a team separate from product design and development could develop a strategy for how a company tackles those issues, with specific proposals for different products.
In addition to birthdate, there should be a deceased date field in Contacts. That data can be used for both memorial purposes and to prevent Siri suggestions about making a posthumous birthday call. There should also be an easy way to archive threads with a deceased loved one in iMessage to preserve those memories. There should be a path to inherit iTunes purchases, even though there are legal differences between a CD and a digital album.
Apple should establish a team that deals with the humanity of their products.
[…]
Apple should be awesome at preserving and respecting the memories contained in devices that are inextricably linked to our daily lives and the interactions with people we love.
Previously:
- Digital Legacy and Account Recovery Contacts
- Take Control of Your Digital Legacy
- What Happens to Content Purchased from Apple When You Die?
- Planning for the Transfer of Confidential Data
- Long-Term Web Hosting
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Handling the death of family across digital distributions services really is a mess. I was fortunate enough to share keepass-databases with my brother before he died so I can keep pretending to be him for those situations. It really sucks that it takes this kind of preparation to do it though.
There was a period where I was locked out of his gmail account due to that I forgot to remove the phonenumber from it when using the recovery codes to remove the regular 2fa, which in turn made me unable to receive steam login codes later. This thankfully resolved itself by just not logging on for like a year, Google just let me in again one day and I could then register a yubikey to the account myself.
