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Cake: Deep Dive
Cake enables users to prepare documents for all their "health, legal, funeral, and legacy decisions in an end-of-life plan" that is securely stored online and shared with loved ones. The services offered by Cake include "life insurance, password managers, pet insurance, eldercare, health insurance, legal services, tombstones, monuments, and burial options". Details of the findings are provided below.
SERVICES
Cake’s services for end-of-life planning include the following:
- Life Insurance: Users can take Cake’s life insurance assessment to ascertain their life insurance needs. Cake also provided a guide to educate users before getting quotes.
- Password Managers: Password managers are used to store "usernames and passwords securely for online accounts" and allow users to authorize a contact who can access the saved data if the user is no longer available. The user can leave instructions regarding how their accounts should be handled after they die.
- Legal Services: Cake users can create many legal documents like their will and other end-of-life documents.
- Eldercare: Cake helps its users to find useful eldercare resources that can be used for future planning.
- Health Insurance: Through Cake, people can find available plans and conduct additional healthcare planning.
- Pet Insurance: Cake can help individuals to conduct more future planning for their pets.
- Tombstones, Monuments, and Burial Options: Cake can assist its users to explore and document their preferences for tombstones, monuments, funerals, and if they want to be buried or cremated, making it easier for their loved ones.
SECURITY OF THE PLATFORM
- The Cake platform is HIPAA compliant, they use bank-level security, and all of their clients’ information is safe whenever it is transferred and saved using 256-bit AES encryption and 2048-bit certificates. Bank-level security refers to the security measures deployed by financial institutions to protect their clients and their assets.
- Financial institutions use “firewall software as their first line of defense against cyber attacks”. The software is updated regularly to stay ahead of the antics of hackers and viruses which are also constantly improved upon.
- Furthermore, financial institutions encrypt all of their online files and transactions. This means that everything is encoded in such a way that cyber hackers cannot easily access their data.
- The standard bank-level security encryption is 256-bit AES (advanced encryption standard). This is used by most professional security systems to prevent data from being accessed by unauthorized third parties. With 256-bit encryption, there is an incredible “number of possible encryption combinations” which a hacker would need to attempt to decipher the code.
- To put it in perspective, the entire world population would take 77,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack a 128-bit encryption key, which is half the size of 256-bit encryption, by attempting every possible combination.
- For users in European, Cake is GDPR compliant. They adhere to strict European Union standards regarding the handling and protection of private data and allowing users to control their own private data. Cake has earned the trust of reputable entities such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and the City of Boston.
- The profile and data of users are completely private to them alone by default. Cake only shares users’ data with individuals who have been authorized by the users and these preferences can always be modified by users.
- Cake does not “sell or share personally identifiable information (PII) with any 3rd party”.
- Comments on Cake’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, as well as reviews from Better Business Bureau and credible media sources like Forbes, PC Mag, Business Insider, and BBC did not raise any concerns regarding the security of the Cake platform.
LEGAL EFFECT OF DOCUMENTS STORED ON THE PLATFORM
- Legal documents which can be stored on Cake’s platform include legal healthcare documents and legal wills. Once the document is legal according to the standards of the user’s state, it can be uploaded to the Cake platform.
- Some states like New York only recognize original hard copies of a will signed by the person, so Cake emphasizes the need to create a will with a lawyer in the user's state that is legally binding.
- Cake helps its users to provide answers to questions regarding their will. The answers can be used while meeting with a lawyer to produce a complete legal document which can then be uploaded to the Cake platform.
- According to the E-Sign Act in the United States, a digitally signed document is as legally valid as a physically signed document.
POSSIBILITY OF THE EXECUTIONER TAMPERING WITH DIGITAL LEGAL DOCUMENTS
- It is almost impossible for the executioner or anyone to tamper with digitally signed legal documents. Digitally signed documents with bank-level security like those of Cake cannot be tampered with or intercepted by unauthorized parties.
- Such documents usually have time stamped audit to verify when they were created, viewed, modified, signed, and archived.
- Also, there are document verification platforms which can easily detect whether a digitally signed document has been modified.
- In addition, for legally binding documents, Cake serves mainly as a digital store of the documents and the original hard copy document is most likely still stored with the person's attorney. Hence, falsification of the digital will by the executioner is unlikely to be effective for legally binding documents as the original hard copy of the document with the person's attorney would remain unaffected.