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Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

I had a very similar idea to this a long time ago and built a basic thing, registered a domain etc, was ready to put it live.. and then I spoke to a lawyer, who told me to think very carefully about whether I really wanted to deal with the possible legal and personal ramifications of sending potentially explosive material on or around someone's death. I decided I probably didn't want to so I shelved it.

I think it's important something like this exists but I'd also ask the author if he's really thought this through.

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Would you really be responsible for this? Like, what’s the worst that could happen? People putting threats or insults into their messages? Can’t you just remove it as soon as it is reported, and be fine? Is there a legal need to proactively monitor your content?

Well, my service was envisioned more as a "whistleblower" kind of scenario where someone might be in possession of information that caused them some kind of fear, whether it be for their life, job, or what have you. Or, a trusted service where it might be crypto keys or other potentially extremely valuable information. Basically, high-value information of some sort which others might be very motivated to acquire, or block release of, or the like. The service was fully encrypted, provably, and my side only held partial keys.

I think the author of this project probably has a slightly different use case in mind, but it's easy to imagine how a project that had my focus could quite easily get embroiled in lawsuits or other drama. I'd still like to do it one day, but it would need to be under circumstances of absolute isolation from myself both physically and legally. For the time being, I don't have the resources and/or time to make that happen, so shelved it was.

IANAL, but I feel a bigger risk would be that you trigger it before it should.

Maybe a bug in your emailserver or that the configuration option that you used to correctly turn off the spam-filter had a bug in it and caused some of the I'm-alive signals to be dropped.

Or worse, your final message gets silently filtered out by the recipient's Gmail/Hotmail for some reason.

Wouldn't be worse as that's not the creator's fault.

As long as the creator didn't do anything wrong to trigger gmail/hotmails detections to go bad. And by wrong I mean violate the undocumented and completely arbitrary and self-fulfilling rules gmail et al employ.

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