Technical protocol

From Registration Of Deaths For Online Services

About

Since online services are, by definition, online, it seems that there should be a secure, reliable way to notify them online of the death of a user. It should not be necessary to obtain paper copies of a person's death certificate to post to the administrators of each online service of which the person was a user.

There appears to be room for a technical protocol to be created, whereby an account (at least, a non-anonymous account) with an online service can, in the event of a person's death, be associated with the governmental record of the person's death. Ideally, all the online services the person had signed up to should be notified automatically of the person's death, and should contact a central database of executors to obtain contact details for the executor, whom they should then notify of the existence of the account. However, not all countries possess sophisticated electronic records of citizens, and in any case there are obvious security concerns. It may be the case that there is a need for something roughly equivalent to the Bereavement Register and the Deceased Preference Service to be created for the online service industry.

This page, therefore, is for members of the community to help draft and re-draft a proposal for a technical protocol that would help connect the relevant parties: the online services, the state register of deaths, and the executors of estates.

Protocol for the registration of deaths with online service providers

Because of the risk of premature obituaries being published, an obituary shall not be an acceptable confirmation of a person's death.

(Please contribute here!)