Deathswitch
Open-knowledge reference entry

Deathswitch was a website that allowed users to store encrypted emails, to be sent out at the time of their death. This was determined by the user entering a password at preset intervals. If the password was not entered after several prompts, the emails would be sent out to the indicated email recipients. The service announced its shutdown on October 22, 2015.
References
External links
David Eagleman (October 19, 2006). "A brief history of death switches" (PDF). Nature. 443 (7113): 882. Bibcode:2006Natur.443..882E. doi:10.1038/443882a. Alt URL Archived 2010-10-11 at the Wayback Machine
Svensson, Peter (March 16, 2009).
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This entry incorporates text from “Deathswitch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.