digital estates

[cellio]

What happens to your digital life -- your email, your online games, your social-networking sites, your online banking, etc -- when you die? Some companies are selling services akin to safe-deposit boxes, so your heirs will be able to get your passwords and stuff. It's an interesting idea, but I think it has some (human-engineering) flaws.

The article raises privacy concerns, but that's the least of the practical issues to my mind. I don't know how I would blend encryption and the ability for a non-tech-savvy recipient to use it, but I think that problem could be solved. (Aside: the non-technical user is going to need a lot more than just a list of username/password pairs.) The much bigger problem I see is maintenance. How many passwords do you have? How often do you change them? Are you going to remember to update the records in your digital safe-deposit box every single time? Only for the important ones, you say? So when you created that throwaway account on eBay to buy one item you didn't bother, and then later you started selling there and didn't think to add it? Until the stored copy is as easy to use as clicking "remember password" in your web browser, it's going to be hard for people to use such a service properly. (And even "remember password" doesn't always do the right thing when you change a password.)

There's also a behavior issue on the other end: the service, of necessity, relies on someone asking for the stored contents. How does the heir know to do that? Can he do it via a phone call? I'm picturing my mother trying to deal with something like this for my father's accounts -- my mother who has never so much as used a web browser or sent email. It's a foreign world to her. Would she realize that it could be important for her to access my father's email? (Would she know if his email provider is auto-billing his credit card until he says to stop?) Or would she assume there's nothing there that matters, if she even thought about it at all?

All that said, the article does make me realize that this sort of thing is important. If something were to happen to Dani, I wouldn't know where all his digital homes are and which ones matter. Having this information available -- if we can also remember to keep it up to date, of course -- would be valuable. But we don't need a service with unproven security and high subscription fees for that. I think it's time to buy a pair of $5 thumb drives to keep in the drawers with the passports and insurance papers.

See also: duplicate entry with its own comments (oops).

Comments

[cellio]

Yeah, most people don't think about this stuff at all. Heck, most people, I gather, aren't all that organized about the more routine stuff (insurance policies, medical power of attorney, etc). I've known for decades where my parents' fireproof box is and what's in it. It doesn't include anything digital so far as I know, though, and I should poke my father about that.