{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_external_evaluation_20260803","source_assessment_id":"ritualized_meaning_and_commitment_enactment__human_computer_interaction:P3:v0","cell_id":"ritualized_meaning_and_commitment_enactment__human_computer_interaction","search_queries":["site:facebook.com/help memorialized accounts legacy contact manage posts reminders official","site:support.google.com accounts Inactive Account Manager official trusted contacts delete account","site:support.apple.com legacy contact access data official","digital legacy bereavement social media memorialization algorithmic reminders research","digital legacy service recurring review update legacy contacts memorial steward platform","site:uniformlaws.org RUFADAA digital assets deceased fiduciary official","site:w3.org accessibility grief memorial interface consent standard WCAG 2.2 official","HCI digital legacy design guidelines stakeholder privacy deceased memorial accounts primary research","Digital Legacy Association best practice service providers bereavement digital assets need policy","site:digitallegacyassociation.org digital legacy best practice social media death professionals","site:facebook.com/help legacy contact strongly suggest memorialized account","platform digital legacy stakeholder needs recurring review research bereaved design","\"Digital Legacy: A Systematic Literature Review\" PDF Doyle Brubaker","\"Engaging with Death Online\" PDF Gulotta Gerritsen Kelliher Forlizzi","site:uniformlaws.org revised uniform fiduciary access digital assets act summary online tool terms service fiduciary"],"sources":[{"source_id":"s1","title":"About Memorialized Accounts","publisher":"Meta Platforms, Inc.","url":"https://www.facebook.com/help/1017717331640041","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Facebook already provides memorialized accounts and platform-recognized legacy contacts.","Memorialized profiles retain previously shared content but are excluded from People You May Know, ads, and birthday reminders.","No one can log into a memorialized account, and an account without a legacy contact cannot be changed.","Meta is an identifiable authorizer for any production-level memorial-account or recommendation behavior."]},{"source_id":"s2","title":"How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account","publisher":"Apple Inc.","url":"https://support.apple.com/en-ie/102631","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"2026-04-16","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Apple provides a formal Legacy Contact mechanism for post-death access to specified account data.","Access requires both an access key and death documentation, demonstrating authenticated platform authority rather than ceremonial authority.","Apple permits multiple legacy contacts, any one of whom may make account-data decisions including permanent deletion.","Some categories, including Keychain credentials and purchased media, remain inaccessible."]},{"source_id":"s3","title":"About Inactive Account Manager","publisher":"Google LLC","url":"https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en-IE","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Google lets users preconfigure inactivity timing, trusted contacts, selected data sharing, and account deletion.","Trusted-contact downloads are identity-verified by phone.","Plans can be revised or disabled during life.","Absent a plan, inactive accounts may be deleted after two years, while family or representatives may separately request closure or, in limited circumstances, content."]},{"source_id":"s4","title":"Current Acts—F: Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Revised","publisher":"Uniform Law Commission","url":"https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/catalog/current/f","source_class":"STANDARD","publication_date":"2016-03-21","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["RUFADAA addresses fiduciary access when an account owner dies or loses capacity.","Executors, trustees, conservators, and agents under power of attorney are recognized fiduciary roles.","The model act distinguishes manageable digital property from electronic communications.","Access to email, texts, and social-media communications is restricted unless the original user consented in an appropriate record, confirming that survivor agreement alone is insufficient authority."]},{"source_id":"s5","title":"Digital Legacy Association—Home","publisher":"Digital Legacy Association CIC","url":"https://digitallegacyassociation.org/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"2026","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["The association explicitly describes digital-asset planning and digital-legacy safeguarding as an increasingly important need.","It supports the public, hospices, health and social care, legal and funeral professionals through training, frameworks, policy work, and research collaboration.","Hospice-sector statements on the page identify uncertainty and loss around managing memories, photos, music, and messages after death.","The association is an identifiable prospective research and adoption partner, although it has not endorsed this proposed observance."]},{"source_id":"s6","title":"Engaging with Death Online: An Analysis of Systems that Support Legacy-Making, Bereavement, and Remembrance","publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery","url":"https://rebeccagulotta.com/info/GulottaGerritsenKelliherForlizzi-DIS2016.pdf","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2016-06-04","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["A content analysis of 75 systems found a substantial existing landscape spanning legacy-making, bereavement, remembrance, genealogy, and public memorialization.","The research reports that digital systems were slow to address the complex issues arising after death.","Persistent digital representations can negatively affect survivors, and indiscriminate preservation is not necessarily beneficial.","The work identifies uncertainty, heterogeneous data, multiple stakeholders, cultural limits, and the need for accessible ways to express long-term data-use preferences."]},{"source_id":"s7","title":"Digital Legacy: A Systematic Literature Review","publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery","url":"https://www.cuidentitylab.com/assets/bibliography/pdf/Doyle2023.pdf","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2023-10","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["The review models digital legacy as a lifecycle of encoding, accessing, and dispossessing rather than a single transfer event.","It identifies multi-user, multi-generational, evolving-platform, accessibility, and cultural-practice challenges.","It notes that inheritors may be unclear, wishes unknown, and ownership-based models insufficient.","It expressly calls for field deployments and studies of actual digital-legacy experiences because much existing evidence is hypothetical or exploratory."]},{"source_id":"s8","title":"From Personal Data to Digital Legacy: Exploring Conflicts in the Sharing, Security and Privacy of Post-mortem Data","publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery / WWW '21","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07807","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2021-04-15","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Two workshops with password-manager users found a post-mortem privacy paradox: people recognize planning's value but avoid acting.","The study identifies tension between strong security during life and appropriate post-mortem access.","It supports the need to separate access authority, privacy, and security rather than share passwords informally.","Its evidence concerns planning and security, not the effectiveness of recurring memorial observances."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"STRONG","rationale":"Independent research and current first-party services visibly establish a consequential socio-technical problem: large heterogeneous digital legacies persist across people and time; wishes and inheritors may be unclear; privacy and security can conflict with access; and persistent representations may burden survivors. Platform-specific controls exist but are fragmented and materially different across Meta, Apple, and Google. The evidence does not establish prevalence for every proposed failure state, such as former stewards retaining access or settings diverging from recommendation behavior.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s5","s6","s7","s8"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"The Digital Legacy Association, hospices, care professionals, platforms, and legally recognized fiduciaries are identifiable stakeholders. The association publicly invites research, training, and policy collaboration and states a need for better digital-legacy safeguarding; Meta, Apple, and Google are identifiable authorizers of production actions. No source shows that any of them wants, will fund, or will deploy the specific recurring ritualized observance.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","closest_analogues":[{"name":"Facebook memorialized accounts and Legacy Contacts","similarity":"Provides a shared memorial space, a platform-recognized steward, reduced algorithmic resurfacing in specified public features, limited moderation, and deletion options.","remaining_difference":"It does not provide the proposed recurring, plural, consent-reviewed observance, steward-renewal cycle, unresolved-matters register, or independently audited conversion of witnessed commitments into verified system actions.","source_ids":["s1","s6","s7"]},{"name":"Apple Legacy Contact","similarity":"Provides authenticated designation of one or more successors, scoped post-death data access, documentation requirements, and deletion authority.","remaining_difference":"It is an access and succession mechanism, not a recurring memorial-governance process involving affected correspondents, plural narratives, witnessing, debrief, drift audit, or recommendation controls.","source_ids":["s2"]},{"name":"Google Inactive Account Manager","similarity":"Supports prospective directives, configurable triggers, trusted contacts, selected data transfer, revision, and deletion.","remaining_difference":"It is a user-configured inactivity plan; it does not govern communal remembrance, post-transfer steward rotation, affected-party objections, recurring review, or platform-specific memorial presentation.","source_ids":["s3"]},{"name":"Digital-legacy planning, memorial, and stewardship practices","similarity":"Existing professional guidance and numerous systems already combine planning, memorialization, data inheritance, remembrance, and long-term access in various forms; research already frames digital legacy as collaborative and lifecycle-based.","remaining_difference":"The reviewed sources do not document one practice that combines a deliberately marked pause in algorithmic circulation with plural consent and standing, recurring duty renewal, authenticated closure actions, drift audit, and retirement.","source_ids":["s5","s6","s7","s8"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"Compared with an equal-time static directive-and-action checklist using the same platform controls, adding a governed, recurring, consent-aware observance with a marked algorithmic pause, plural witnessing, explicit duty renewal, and post-event audit will increase correctly authorized and verified stewardship actions and detection of unresolved stakeholder conflicts without increasing privacy violations, coercion, or distress. This is a contrastive and falsifiable claim; its benefit is not established by the reviewed evidence.","confidence":"MODERATE"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"A synthetic or participant-controlled replica can implement the script, provenance labels, opt-outs, role transfer, action register, and simulated platform verification using ordinary web and facilitation technology. Official products demonstrate that authenticated legacy designation, data access, deletion, and some resurfacing suppression are technically possible. Production deployment is materially harder: relevant controls differ by platform; APIs or transactional guarantees are not established; memorial, recommendation, notification, and access actions remain platform-authorized; and fiduciary access varies with user consent and jurisdiction. Emotional safety, affected-party standing, accessibility, cultural legitimacy, data minimization, incident response, and effectiveness require empirical validation.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s6","s7","s8"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"The intervention targets privacy, account security, unwanted resurfacing, misrepresentation, and continuity of obligations in a sensitive life event. Realized impact and prevalence remain unmeasured.","source_ids":["s5","s6","s7","s8"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"Professional bodies and care-sector stakeholders express a need for digital-legacy planning and safeguarding, while major platforms maintain legacy features. Pull for this particular observance is absent.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s5"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"The proposal adds recurring multi-party governance, witnessed accountability, audit, and retirement to static controls, but the symbolic layer may add no benefit beyond a well-designed checklist and facilitator.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s6","s7"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"No exact match was found in the eight-source set, and the full combination is plausibly distinctive. Components and lifecycle stewardship are already well established, so only the integrated contrastive claim remains.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s5","s6","s7"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"A sandboxed replica and manual action ledger are feasible; authenticated cross-platform execution, recommendation pausing, auditability, and rollback are not demonstrated.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s7"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"A professional association or hospice could authorize a rehearsal, but only platforms and legally recognized account authorities can execute production actions. Jurisdiction and original-user consent limit what survivors may authorize.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":2,"rationale":"The problem, adjacent practices, and research gaps are documented, but the proposal has no direct acceptability, mechanism, safety, workflow, or comparative-effect evidence.","source_ids":["s6","s7","s8"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"If effective, consent vetoes, authority checks, action verification, steward handoff, audit, and retirement could catch errors that static settings miss. Whether they do so without creating new exposure or pressure is untested.","source_ids":["s4","s7","s8"]},"scalability":{"score":2,"rationale":"The manual sandbox can scale modestly, but production scaling is constrained by platform-specific controls, legal jurisdictions, cultural variation, accessibility, facilitator competence, and high-touch safety review.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5","s7"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and run a 12-24-dyad prospective sandbox study with living volunteers, synthetic or redacted replicas, an equal-time static-checklist comparator, independent safety monitoring, legal/privacy review, facilitation, interviews, verification logging, and analysis.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["No production accounts or bereaved participants","Part-time HCI researcher, facilitator, prototype engineer, legal/privacy adviser, and independent safety reviewer","Six-to-nine-month study including protocol and analysis","No external cost quotations were obtained; this is a resource-equivalent estimate"],"source_ids":["s4","s7","s8"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Build a security-reviewed one-platform prototype, consent and standing workflow, provenance store, role and audit logs, accessibility support, incident procedures, policy mapping, and facilitator training for limited partnered deployment.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["One platform and one legal jurisdiction","Official authentication only; no password sharing","Manual review for sensitive materials and disputed authority","No custom recommendation-system integration unless the platform participates"],"source_ids":["s1","s4","s5","s7"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"1M_TO_5M","scope":"Launch a limited regional service with production platform integration or formal support workflow, trained facilitators, privacy/security engineering, legal operations, accessibility, participant support, incident response, evaluation, and partner onboarding.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["One major platform or a tightly bounded set of services","Hundreds, not millions, of annual cases","Business-hours support with escalation coverage","Platform cooperation and jurisdiction-specific legal review are secured"],"source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Maintain a limited service through facilitator time, case review, platform and legal-policy updates, security and access audits, participant support, accessibility maintenance, harm review, training, and outcome monitoring.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Limited regional volume","Substantial manual review remains","No large-scale content hosting or 24/7 crisis service","Costs increase sharply with platforms, jurisdictions, languages, and case volume"],"source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5","s7"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"Primary research, a systematic review, professional-body statements, and first-party platform documentation independently establish fragmented post-mortem access, privacy, security, remembrance, and lifecycle challenges.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s5","s6","s7","s8"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The Digital Legacy Association is a credible prospective research/adoption partner that publicly supports collaborative work, while Meta, Apple, Google, and legally recognized fiduciaries are identifiable authorizers for the production actions in scope. None has endorsed this candidate.","source_ids":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The recurring observance can be compared against an equal-time static directive-and-action checklist on authorization accuracy, verified action completion, unresolved-conflict detection, privacy incidents, perceived coercion, distress, and perceived necessity of the symbolic elements.","source_ids":["s6","s7","s8"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A small prospective sandbox study using only living volunteers and participant-controlled replicas can test feasibility, mechanisms, and safety without changing production accounts or making bereavement-effect claims.","source_ids":["s7","s8"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The next step can avoid production authority and deceased-person consent issues by using synthetic or redacted replicas, existing volunteer directives, independent halt authority, private opt-out, and simulated actions. This does not clear later deployment with bereaved people or real accounts.","source_ids":["s2","s3","s4","s7","s8"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The four bands are scoped resource-equivalent estimates with explicit assumptions, but no source in the permitted eight provides comparable 2026 implementation prices, staffing rates, platform-integration costs, or case-volume data.","source_ids":[]}},"next_evidence_step":"Partner with a digital-legacy professional body or university HCI lab to preregister a 12-24-dyad prospective study using living volunteers, their designated contacts, and synthetic or participant-controlled redacted account replicas. Randomize dyads to (A) the complete governed observance and (B) an equal-time static directive-and-action checklist using identical mock platform capabilities, then cross over only if carryover can be controlled. Give both arms the same authority briefing and action menu. Primary measures: proportion of closure actions correctly assigned to the account holder, living data subject, fiduciary, or platform; proportion of actions completed and verified against simulated behavior; unresolved stakeholder conflicts detected; unauthorized disclosure or access attempts; and successful role handoff. Safety and burden measures: private opt-out use, perceived coercion, distress before and after, unwanted exposure, accessibility failures, and facilitator halts. Independently adjudicate every authority classification and require a proceed/adapt/hold/retire verdict. Falsify the incremental claim if the observance does not materially improve verified correct actions or conflict detection over the checklist, if symbolic elements are judged unnecessary by most participants, or if it increases authority errors, privacy exposure, coercion, distress, or uncompleted actions. This study is a feasibility and mechanism test, not evidence of benefit in bereavement.","blocking_evidence":["No comparative evidence shows that ritual marking, silence, witnessing, or recurring renewal improves stewardship beyond an equal-time static checklist using the same controls.","No field evidence establishes acceptability, cultural legitimacy, accessibility, or emotional safety for bereaved people, nonparticipants, correspondents, or contested families.","No reviewed source establishes that production platform APIs can pause recommendations and notifications, atomically execute closure actions, verify actual resurfacing behavior, or roll actions back.","No jurisdiction-specific analysis establishes authority for each proposed data, correspondence, moderation, correction, retention, and deletion action.","No adopter, platform, hospice, or funder has committed to this specific observance.","No sourced 2026 cost benchmarks, staffing rates, integration estimates, or case-volume assumptions were found."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"The search assessed only eight direct sources and found adjacent platform features, legal rules, professional practices, and HCI research. It did not measure world novelty, patentability, freedom to operate, market size, or realized impact. The defensible boundary is only that no exact implementation of the full recurring, consent-aware, algorithmically marked, witnessed, executable, audited, and retireable observance was identified in this bounded source set.","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":false,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Secure a named research partner and platform-policy contact without treating either as endorsement.","Preregister the sandbox comparator, authority-adjudication rules, effect thresholds, safety thresholds, and falsifiers.","Demonstrate that all mock closure actions are authenticated, verifiable, reversible, and separable from ceremonial agreement.","Measure whether the ritualized components add value beyond an equal-time static checklist.","Validate private opt-out, accessibility, data minimization, halt, distress-support, and incident-response procedures with living volunteers.","Obtain jurisdiction-specific legal and platform-policy review before any production-account or bereaved-participant study.","Replace resource-equivalent cost estimates with staffing quotes, platform-integration estimates, and case-volume sensitivity analysis."],"reason":"Bounded web research verifies the underlying problem, credible stakeholders and authorizers, substantial adjacent prior art, and a testable remaining claim. It cannot establish the claim's comparative benefit, emotional safety, workflow performance, authority accuracy, or production-platform feasibility. Those questions require proprietary platform information and live controlled testing, so the pipeline must stop for empirical research rather than continue with more general web search."},"proposal_index":3}