What Happens to Your Online Life After You’re Gone?
Nowadays, and for the past decade or more, we spend countless hours building our online presence – from social media accounts and email communications to digital assets and cloud storage. Yet there remains a question few of us consider; what happens to this virtual life when we’re no longer here?.
This is where the idea of Digital legacy planning comes in. Though it may come as a strange thought to many people, and it certainly struck me as a strange idea upon first hearing about it. Given that having a social media and online presence is a staple in most people’s lives nowadays, dealing with our own or another person’s digital legacy is becoming a real and increasing issue to be solved after death. Planning one’s digital legacy then is something which will become increasingly important as time goes on and less and less people pass away without leaving any digital footprint left behind.
The Digital Footprint We Leave Behind:
If we stop for a moment to consider our digital presence online: we, in most cases find email accounts filled with personal and professional communications, social media profiles documenting all our life’s greatest moments, cloud storage accounts containing precious, and perhaps less precious photos, videos and documents, cryptocurrency wallets, online banking accounts, subscription services, the list goes on and on. Without any foresight or planning, these digital leftovers from our lives could become inaccessible to loved ones, leading to both practical and emotional challenges for those left behind.
Digital Inheritance:
The legal circumstances surrounding digital assets today is complex and rapidly evolving. Many online services have developed their own policies regarding deceased users’ accounts.As an example, Facebook offers options to memorialize accounts or designate legacy contacts, while Google’s Inactive Account Manager allows users to determine what happens to their data after a certain period of inactivity. A problem arises, however, in that, these features are only of any use if they’ve been activated before a person’s death.
Digital assets themselves fall into several categories: Firstly, we have assets with financial value, such as cryptocurrency, online banking accounts, PayPal and other money transfer accounts, and domain names. Then we have assets with sentimental value – personal photos, videos, and private communications. Followed by online accounts, profiles and subscriptions which may need management or closure by family members or relatives.
Planning A Digital Legacy:
To begin planning a digital legacy, the first recommended step is in conducting a digital audit. First by creating a comprehensive inventory of your online accounts, including login credentials and account numbers. After this, setting up a password manager with some type of emergency access is incredibly useful.
Step two, designate a digital executor. Find someone technically capable enough to handle your online presence and close enough to you, to know and respect your wishes. This person will need to understand which accounts to preserve, memorialize, or delete according to your preferences so make sure to choose wisely.
After this, clear instructions will be needed for each type of digital asset. Whether it’s an email thread, blog, etc that you wish to see preserved or wether it’s a social media account etc that you wish to have permanently deleted. There exists several tools that can help in saving or deleting each kind of digital asset. Password managers like LastPass and 1Password offer emergency access features, which is ideal for preserving content, and furthermore, digital legacy services such as SecureSafe: https://www.securesafe.com/en provide specialized platforms for arranging and transferring digital assets.
Privacy and Security Considerations
In planning your digital legacy, balancing accessibility with security can be challenging. Sharing login credentials may seem practical, but Instead, consider using a digital vault (a digital vault is an online safe for your digital assets, keeping critical information in the digital realm secure. or leaving encrypted instructions with your trusted executor.)
After all this is done, you will have to ensure your plan includes access to backup codes or authentication devices. Cryptocurrency recovery phrases in particular need to be backed up somewhere as lost access means permanently lost assets, So backing up all relevant codes and passwords becomes a must in securing your digital legacy.
The Future of Digital Legacies
As our lives have already become partly digital, and with the digital aspect of our lives looking likely to grow if anything rather than diminish, the importance of digital legacy planning will only grow over time. Virtual reality spaces, digital art collections, along with more emerging and yet to emerge digital assets will create more and more of a need to consider and plan our digital legacies, but the most compelling reason for digital legacy planning is, and I think will remain, its impact on those grieving a loved one. Without taking digital legacies into account, families can face the issue of locked devices, photos which cannot be accessed and issues accessing or deleting online accounts during an already difficult time. Clear digital legacy instructions can provide both useful assistance and comfort to those dealing with the loss of a loved one in this digital age.
Resources:
- https://www.telegraphindia.com/science-tech/sorting-out-ones-digital-legacy-is-more-important-today-than-ever/cid/1847754
- https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/oct/16/how-to-manage-digital-legacy-after-death-will
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