Patent ID: 8818958

Claim:
A system for managing a virtual safe deposit box, comprising: one or more processing units; and memory comprising instructions that when executed by at least some of the one or more processing units implement the following: an archival model component facilitating retention of data stored by the virtual safe deposit box for a pre-defined duration, the archival model component archiving the data to the virtual safe deposit box in real time, the pre-defined duration comprising a lifespan of the virtual safe deposit box, a lifespan of an owner of the virtual safe deposit box, a lifespan of an owner-identified as an authorized entity, or a lifespan of a data storage service provider; an intelligent component automatically determining a value of information, where the information is represented by the data, the automatic determination of the value of information based at least in part on reasoning about and inferring states of a system, an environment associated with the virtual safe deposit box and a user of the virtual safe deposit box from a set of observations captured via one or more events and second data, the automatic determination of the value of information performed using a support vector machine, a neural network, an expert system, a Bayesian belief network, fuzzy logic or a data fusion engine, the inferring comprising identifying a context associated with the virtual safe deposit box, identifying an action that the user desires to be automatically performed and generating a probability distribution over states of interest based at least in part on the one or more events and the second data; a privacy component controlling access to the virtual safe deposit box based at least in part on the authorized entity; an integrity component maintaining at least a portion of the data in a state unless the state is changed by the authorized entity; a conversion component transforming at least a portion of the data from a physical form to a digital form; and a policy engine: enforcing a policy comprising an access setting associated with an ability for one or more authorized entities to access the data, the access setting managing one or more permissions associated with at least a portion of the data, the access based at least in part on a pre-authorized entity; modifying the access setting based at least in part on the automatically determined value of information; and enforcing a transfer policy for triggering a transfer of: at least some of the data to an entity; and the virtual safe deposit box to the entity, the enforcing automatically performed based at least in part on a passage of a duration of time, the policy engine implementing a data duration policy for defining a duration and a lifespan of at least a portion of the data, the policy engine implementing a second policy making at least a portion of the data not recoverable.