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‘Digital legacy’ solutions: wills of the future

A bizarre new trend: ’digital legacy’ solutions to take care of your digital assets in the event of death

On a recent trip to Singapore, good friends started talking about their social media accounts, asking “What happens to them when you die?”. It was sparked by an odd update on Facebook from a friend who had passed away unexpectedly the year before.

It was a delicate issue and an odd conversation to have had. Of course, nobody likes talking about a premature end, not least that of a friend of family member but it seemed nobody would have the heart to go in and close his account. In fact, even if somebody wanted to, they probably couldn’t as it was unlikely anyone knew his password.

It got me thinking and I took to Google. Apparently, this question of ‘what happens to your social media when you die’ has already been raised and there are a raft of companies lining up to provide us with a way to store our social media passwords as well as other key information and documents we’d like to ‘pass on’ in the event of death. It’s called our ‘digital legacy’.

In reading in to the topic, I found that the biggest tension comes when you have to decide what takes precedence: the privacy of the owner or the rights of the heirs to their so called ‘digital inheritance’. For a fairly straightforward question, you quickly find yourself lost in a set of legal and moral considerations!

Delving further, I was surprised to find some companies offering an ‘eternity’ type service whereby they continue to send posts, emails and other digital messages on your behalf after you die! This will no doubt divide opinion.

Perhaps it is just too morbid a subject for me, or perhaps it is just too unthinkable but the truth is that the need for these services, the ‘digital will’ as it were, is growing and it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that an ‘online guardian’ of your digital assets will be a normal talking point in the coming years.

One workaround to the problem is to include language in your will to authorise access to and to transfer ownership of your digital assets, data, media and information on death. However, with so few of the digital generation owning wills (the traditional means of passing on assets), there is a question as to who would embrace such a forward thinking and equally dooming online version of the service.

If you’d like to see what kind of services are on offer, out of curiosity, this site – ’the digital beyond’ – offers a fairly comprehensive list!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Digitia .