Death sites depress me, not because they deal with death and have sinister-sounding names like Death Switch, Slightly Morbid, or Legacy Locker, but because they take care of who has access to your online content after you die! I suppose it makes sense. A decade or two ago, matters related to death were a lot more straight-forward. You had some tangible personal belongings, that you could easily divy up among your friends and family. Even intangible assets - negotiable instruments, intellectual property and such could be easily passed on. The more assets you had, the more complicated it got, but on the whole, bequesting assets to an heir was less and less labyrinthine in each previous decade.
 
But, now given that much of our time is spent on the net, and we participate in confidential online activities that may (or may not) involve financial transactions, you have to think about who has access to you digital property, that is your online accounts and documents after you have given up the ghost! This is especially something of concern if you want to keep all that information private as long as you are alive! The net is littered with email accounts, blogs and social network profiles of people who are no longer with us and who have no one to claim their accounts. Their online life is there somewhere, lingering like a poltergeist. Who knows when they might show up and what they might reveal to the world about them! I am willing to bet there is millions of dollars in unclaimed money sitting on the net in many paypal accounts and such as I write about it! A huge waste of wealth!
 
If I were to make a quick list of all my online accounts that mean something to me, it would add up to at least 20. Tapi and some of my family already have the key to my online life. They are free to go into my email inboxes and read my email, tweet from my twitter, spy on my friends on facebook, edit all my blog posts and defame me all they want, whenever they want. It's besides the point that they don't do any of that despite such free access, except watching my netflix movies and occasionally messing with my queue. I suppose they have no reason to. I don't live that covetable life that they would want to experience vicariously through me.  But what this means is, I am clearly not the best patron for these death sites. My loved ones already have access to my online assets and don't have to wait till I've met my end.

But if, unlike me, you are that buttoned-up person, who likes to keep your online activity private, you may want to consider these sites.

Not just death, Slightly Morbid for instance, provides the same services to people who are in an emergency situation, like a serious accident or a natural disaster. Death Switch has an automated system that prompts you to type out your password on a regular schedule. If you do not enter the password for some period of time, it deduces you as critically disabled or dead, and sends out your pre-scripted automated message to your loves ones. This I find scary. It's a lot to put my family through by having them read my death letter when I am still alive! I also have accounts on sites that I've stopped using. I don't want them thinking my lack of activity on their site is because I have gone to meet my maker! But as far as they are concerned, I may very well have. It's all the same to them! I also don't want to have to keep proving that I am alive on "Death Switch", even if they let me set how frequently I want to prove it to them.
 
But, here is the thing. I am one of those people you don't like! My job requires me to spam people every once in a while to promote some of the excellent work we do in our organization. I am not about to tell you what I do for a living, and get dissed for sounding preachy. But, I deal with online marketing and I send out a lot of emails to a lot of people. 
 
Every so often I feel the need to purge my office email database off deceased people! It's a dodgy and depressing decision. You may wonder why I care that deceased people continue to receive my emails in their inbox. But, if someone has inherited the inbox of a deceased relative, I have found new audience to promote my cause (healthy living!), which for all you know is advice they need (especially if the relative passed away as a result of ill-health) or may be interested in (if the relative was an admirable advocate for healthy living) They may want to carry on the tradition and contribute to the cause or even pay a tribute to their relative for having gone through a difficult time or serving a great cause. In essence, they have inherited goodwill and good health! 
 
On the other hand, you want to be respectful and not spam a deceased person's inbox for ethical reasons! It's not the most wonderful feeling to think that there are people out there wanting to make money off you for having lost a loved one! It's a matter of perspective whether it is okay that death is such a huge business. But death is business to many. I can easily think up a hundred important jobs related to death that I am glad are being addressed. In the case of nonprofits, it is not even business, it has to do with passing on the legacy of serving a good cause.
 
Another reason I feel the need to purge my database is because, if an email I send out goes unread because a person is deceased, it throws off statistics on email performance, making it difficult for me to gauge accurately how many "living" people were inspired to act on the cause after reading the email.
 
When you work in a health organization, dealing with death is inevitable! But the fact that reading about death sites is making me think of how it will affect my work and not so much my personal life is really disturbing! What I find amusing is how much we take the whole religious concept of "life after death" to a whole new level! We seem not only to want to live on forever, but also control how we will the live and with whom we will live, after we've crossed the great divide.