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Most of us struggle with thoughts of our own mortality.  But what if you could live forever? Swiss DNA Bank is offering a limited form of immortality: For a one-time fee of several hundred dollars, they will store a sample of your DNA along with a digital record of your memories in a Swiss vault buried inside of a mountain. But can you trust them?

According to the website, Swiss DNA Bank offers several different packages. You don’t have to fork over your genetic sequence-you can just choose a data-only package. Prices are as follows: $299 for 1 GB of storage with no DNA, $498 for 2 GB with no DNA, and $598 for 4 GB. If you want to store a DNA sample, it’s $399 for DNA and 1 GB of storage, $598 for DNA and 2 GB and $698 for the deluxe package: DNA and 4 GB of storage.

Now, I don’t know about you, but 4 GB of storage just isn’t that much for me. That’s about the size of the memory card in my BlackBerry, and it’s full. Additional memory is available for the same prices as the data only kit listed above. To ensure the security of all of this sensitive, private information, you also get a Swiss DNA Bank card that generates a random password for you whenever you want to access your account.

Swiss DNA Bank has an interesting concept. The idea of preserving a record of your everyday life for posterity reminded me of this  post on TechCrunch. If you, like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, think that it would be just peachy to wear a device that tracks, photographs and geo-tags your every movement, I suppose a Swiss vault inside of a mountain would be a better place to store all of that stuff than “the cloud.”

Personally, my sense of self-importance is just not well-developed enough for either of these options to appeal to me. Record every waking minute of my life? In addition to the obvious privacy issues, why would I want to do that?  Likewise, why would I want to pay hundreds (probably thousands in the end, for a whole lifetime) to have my memories stored in a super-secret Swiss vault inside a mountain when a photo album, scrapbook or diary would serve the same purpose?

However, just as some people will gleefully buy a device that records and indexes everything they do should one become available, others will probably jump at the chance to have a piece of themselves stored securely under a mountain somewhere.  In addition to the security they claim to provide, Swiss DNA Bank does advertise some neat features.

For example, you can designate a release date for specific memories, so if you have a dark secret that you want to carry with you to the grave, you can store it on their servers and release it to your descendants whenever you decide enough time has passed. You can also designate heirs and allow them to access your data, so your kids and grandkids and great-grandkids can access your life on the computer.  Supposedly, the fees you pay will be invested into Swiss bonds and such in order to ensure that the company has enough money to transfer all of your data into new media storage formats indefinitely as old technology become obsolete.

Of course, the biggest issue for a service like this is credibility, and something about this website just doesn’t seem right to me. First, the text contains numerous grammatical errors.  Now, at Useful Tools we review apps created by people from all over the world.  A website written in less-than-perfect English usually isn’t  an issue unless it makes it difficult to use the site. However, in this case, the various and sundry grammatical issues in the text make me nervous about recommending it.

If you’re asking people to pay you hundreds of dollars, send you their DNA and use your service to store all of their personal data, your website should be perfect. Full stop. If you can afford to buy a bunker under a mountain in the Swiss Alps, you ought to be able to hire a proofreader.  If you can’t, there’s a problem.

Another, much more significant  problem, and one that I just noticed after writing all of this- the Verisign seal on this website is not clickable.  Real Verisign seals are supposed to be  clickable. When I went to Verisign’s website and tried to verify they web address, Verisign wasn’t able to do so.  MAJOR credibility problem.

For the time being, my advice to you is this: put down the cotton swab, put away your credit cards, and don’t give these guys any of your personal info until they prove they are trustworthy!

What do you think? Are these guys for real? Even if they are for real, would you trust them with your credit card number, DNA and security passwords for all of your accounts (which the website encourages you to store with them for “safekeeping?”)

I’ll give them props for an innovative concept, at least…but I don’t think I would.

Our Rating of Swiss DNA Bank

Tags: Lifestyle

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