In the year and a half since I last wrote about planning for digital assets not much has changed in Massachusetts. Our state is still one of a handful of states that has not enacted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) , although there is […]
What happens to email, usernames, passwords, banking information, social media and blogs when an individual dies? It’s a question most people haven’t considered, but should. Without proper planning and documentation, online information may become inaccessible and may eventually cease to exist. Today, almost everyone has some type of online […]
The average American owns 90 online accounts and likely has no idea what happens to these assets when he/she dies. You can protect & preserve your digital assets through digital estate planning.
(firmenpresse) – [Digital Estate Planning](https://digitalestateplanning.com) is new legal frontier in estate planning and estate administration due to the mass proliferation of computers, smartphones, tablets, apps and online accounts like banking, investment, photos, cloud drives and more.
Did you know that you have a digital estate? You may think you dont, but if you are reading this blog you probably do. What is your digital estate? Similar to your traditional estate, your digital estate is comprised of the digital assets you own. Take a look at the following categories of digital assets which are considered in any comprehensive [digital estate plan](https://stephenpstewartlaw.com/digital-estate-planning/):
1. Hardware: computers, external hard drives or flash drives, tablets, smartphones, digital music players, e-readers, digital cameras, and other digital devices that can be used to store date electronically
2. Data: Any information or data that is stored electronically, whether stored online, in the cloud, or on a physical device
3. Online Accounts: email and communications accounts, social media accounts, shopping accounts, money and credit accounts such as PayPal, bank accounts, loyalty rewards accounts, photo and video sharing accounts, video gaming accounts, online storage accounts, and websites and blogs that you may manage, including any content you’ve posted to those sites, any communication and correspondence made through and stored on those sites, your personal information, credit card information, purchase and browsing history and any credit you may have and the information necessary to access those accounts.
4. Domain names
5. Intellectual property: including copyrighted materials, trademarks, and any code you may have written and own.
How many of these assets do you own? What happens to your digital estate? These are common questions that many people have as they begin to think about the implications of how many digital assets or online accounts they actually own and how many of them actually contain really important data or files.
The average American owns 90 online accounts and likely has no idea what happens to these assets when he or she dies. Do you? If not, dont feel bad. This is a very hard question to answer because the answer depends on several things, including:
1. Federal Law: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (the ECPA), as amended, specifically, 18 U.S.C. §2702. The ECPA governs the voluntary disclosure of stored electronic content to third parties other than the owner by custodians of the electronic content. The rules are complex and there are different standards and requirements depending on, among other things, the nature of stored data and whether the account holder was the recipient or sender of the electronic communication.
2. State Law – The North Carolina Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (the NC Act). The NC Act prescribes rules and procedures by which fiduciaries such as executors and agents under powers of attorney may access stored electronic communications and content within the limits and rules prescribed by the ECPA.
3. The Terms of Service Agreement for each online account, such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!, have specific procedures for handling your account upon your incapacity or death and vary greatly in their flexibility, ease of use and degree of access granted to third parties, such as executors and agents under powers of attorney. For example, Google provides an Inactive Account Manager tool which allows you to designate persons to receive notice and/or access your stored content after a specified period of inactivity. You can also direct that the stored content be deleted. Other providers such as Apple and Yahoo provide that neither the account nor the stored content is transferrable at death. Rather, the account will be closed and the content deleted once they are notified of the death of the account holder.
How do you plan for your digital estate with so many variables and different providers?
Having established that (1) you have a digital estate; and (2) the rules governing your digital estate are complex, what do you do?
1. List all of your digital assets and how to access each and every one.
2. Decide what you want done with each digital asset you own, including whether they should be deleted, archived, or transferred to specific persons, such as family members or business partners.
3. Determine who you want to be responsible for managing and transferring your digital estate.
4. Determine what will be required to transfer, close, delete or otherwise manage your digital assets in each account. You should also provide for access to all devices such as computers, tablets and smartphones on which digital content is stored.
5. Consult with a qualified estate planning professional to formalize your digital estate plan and/or coordinate it with your traditional estate plan. In order to take advantage of some of the protections offered by state law such as the NC Act, you must include specific language in a will, trust, power of attorney or other document. TIP: Do not include usernames and passwords in a will, power of attorney or other document that may become part of the public record.
6. Store this information in a secure, but accessible place.
7. Review and update this information regularly.
In order to ensure that your digital assets are properly managed and preserved in the event of your incapacity or death, you need to make special advanced arrangements so your executor, trustee or agent will know what to do and will have the legal authority to do it. If you fail to properly plan for your digital estate, your loved ones will have a difficult time accessing your digital assets and, in some cases, access to accounts will be terminated and all digital content lost. Be proactive. Plan now. Get help.
BSides Manchester What happens to the numerous user logins you’ve accumulated after you die or become too infirm to manipulate a keyboard?
Some people have a plan, the digital equivalent of living will, or have chosen “family” option in a password management package such as LastPass or have entrusted a book of passwords to a family member.
But the consequences of doing nothing are not as neutral as some might expect and were spelled out during an informative presentation by Chris Boyd of Malwarebyes at BSides in Manchester on Thursday. The presentation, cheerily titled “The digital entropy of death”, covered what could happen to your carefully curated online presence after you log off.
Miscreants are already targeting obviously abandoned profiles. Boyd explained that in some cases it’s easier for fraudsters to gain hold of these accounts than the account-holders’ relatives, because crooks know the systems better and controls – although present – are often deeply embedded on the sites such as Facebook, Twitter et al.
Alongside regular postings asking for help on Facebook due to compromise of dead people’s logins (examples here and here) there’s also the problem of “cloning”.
“Facebook users have reported receiving friend requests from accounts associated with dead friends and family members,” The Independent reports. “Such requests appear to be the result of cloning or hacking scams that see criminals try [to] add people on the site, and then use that friendship as a way of stealing money from them or running other cons.”
Social media accounts are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Most people these days run 100+ accounts, as figures from password management software apps show. These figures are only increasing over time. Some sites are managing the inevitability of their users shuffling off this mortal coil with features designed to deactivate accounts after months of inactivity or other features, Boyd explained in a recent blog post:
Many sites now offer a way for relatives and executors to memorialise, or just delete, an account. In other circumstances, services would rather you ‘self-manage’ and plan ahead for your own demise (cheerful!) by setting a ticking timer. If the account is inactive for the specified length of time, then into the great digital ether it goes.
While a lot of services don’t openly advertise what to do in the event of a death on their website, they will give advice should you contact them, whether social network, email service, or web host. When there’s no option available, though, people will forge their own path and take care of their so-called ‘digital estate planning’ themselves.
Users would be ill-advised to leave everything to their next of kin. “Do some pre-handover diligence, and take some time to ensure everything is locked down tight,” Boyd explained. “If there’s anything hugely important you need them to know, tell them in advance.”
People may have bought digital purchases tied to certain platforms. Games on Steam, or music on iTunes or Spotify.
“Legally, when you go, so do your files (in as much as anything you can’t download and keep locally is gone forever),” Boyd explained. “That’s because you’re buying into a licence to use a thing, as opposed to buying the thing itself.”
Here’s a video of his presentation, if you want to see more…
There’s nothing stopping someone from passing on a login to a family member so they can continue to make use of all the purchased content, at least for now. Boyd predicted that at some point, all of our digital accounts tied to financial purchases will have some sort of average human lifespan timer attached to them.
Millennials mark the first generation not to know life before an always-on, everywhere internet, which will become the norm from now on. “Younger generations absolutely will demand reforms to the way we think about digital content, ownership, and inheritance,” Boyd concluded. ®
As well as the inevitable rise and fall of social media site (e.g. MySpace), and web 2.0 services there is also the issue of link rot, the phenomenon of more and more URLs not working over time. This issue is covered by Boyd in another recent blog post here.
Click here to view original web page at The digital entropy of death: what happens to your online accounts when you die
Unless you’re planning on having your mind jammed inside some sort of computer chip, eventually mortality will catch up and you’re going to have to work out what you’ll do with all of your online accounts. When it’s time to shuffle off this mortal coil, you might, theoretically, be slightly annoyed if someone is using your dormant accounts to spam viagra or fake Twitter apps. The sad reality is, when we go, we leave behind a potentially terrifying amount of accounts lying around in the digital ether, and not all of them may be as secure as one would like.
Even if they’re locked down with multiple security steps, someone could break into a database and pilfer insecure information from the back end. We have the very odd situation of there being a digital zombie sleeper army, ready and willing to come back and cause all sorts of security/spam issues worldwide.
Is there anything we can do about it? Can relatives ensure we don’t come back as some sort of bizarre cyber-horror? Do websites and services have any process in place for this strange new world of accounts that are, to coin a phrase, just taking a nap?
Surprisingly, help is at hand more often than not. First, though, we need to have a think about some sort of tally.
Passwords are a great way to gauge how many accounts we have personally. Check out any number of “How many accounts do we have” articles going back several years. Very handy! An unintended side effect of said articles and their number crunching is that we can also use that data to try and map out the kind of problem we may be facing with orphaned accounts. The average UK consumer alone has something like 188 online accounts, and that figure is from 2015—no doubt the number continues to rise as every aspect of our lives winds its way online.
Speaking of number crunching: 151,000 people die every day. Something like 55 million people die every year. Even if just 10 percent of the 500,000 people who die in the UK annually had 188 accounts each, that’d still be 94 million accounts suddenly abandoned—more than enough to cause a spot of bother. Then throw in the accounts of the recently deceased from around the world, and the numbers are suddenly a bit panic-inducing.
I’d be surprised if scammers don’t set aside a little time for targeting obviously abandoned profiles. Aside from regular postings asking for help on Facebook due to compromise of dead people’s logins [1], [2], there’s also the problem of “cloning.” Once you start poking around this subject, problems are everywhere.
Of course, there are a fair few security-centric things we can do now to ensure we make it as hard as possible for those going on a spot of dormant hunting. Multi-factor authentication, password managers, good browsing practices, blockers, security tools…in short, everything you’re hopefully doing by default anyway. It’ll all help to keep your accounts in lockdown when the time comes that you no longer require them.
Additionally, not all services will be around forever—the endless churn of the web will see to that. Today’s social network is tomorrow’s “bought out and turned into something for delivering pizzas by taxi.” One can assume a large portion of all but the biggest accounts you have will, eventually, crash and burn. Not good for them, not good for people using the service, but definitely good for anyone no longer fussed about the paradigm shift in pizzas and taxis.
As time has passed, digital providers have realised they need to start offering some options for relatives of the recently deceased—one can’t assume everyone knows their security stuff, and many relatives would be hugely distressed to see accounts of a dead relative tweeting about healthcare plans or posting movie promos to Instagram.
Many sites now offer a way for relatives and executors to memorialise, or just delete, an account. In other circumstances, services would rather you ” self-manage” and plan ahead for your own demise (cheerful!) by setting a ticking timer. If the account is inactive for the specified length of time, then into the great digital ether it goes. These are useful options to have available.
While a lot of services don’t openly advertise what to do in the event of a death on their website, they will give advice should you contact them, whether social network, email service, or web host. When there’s no option available, though, people will forge their own path and take care of their so-called “digital estate planning” themselves.
What do you do if the visible services your loved ones used don’t do the whole “death resolution” thing? Worse, how do you even know about the potentially hundreds of logins they have sitting around elsewhere? Sure, you might know about the really obvious ones but people don’t typically draw up a list of the weird, wonderful (and possibly not wonderful) services they used and hand it to their next of kin.
What we are seeing is people making use of password managers in ways other than having a convenient and secure login to services; they’re also creating back up accounts for their digital departure. In these situations, a fully fleshed out password manager, containing all of a person’s logins, has its access stored in a secure place and given to a close relative. Of course, the relative receiving this digital treasure trove is going to be extremely trusted—they probably don’t want to hand it to that crazy uncle who shouts at family gatherings.
The manner in which they hand over the password manager account is incredibly important, too. Is it a physical thing? A login written on paper? Something digital? Is it secure? Maybe it’s a hard drive. Is it encrypted? How will it be updated with new logins/ changes to passwords? Does the relative live nearby if it’s physical? If they live far away, would something purely online make more sense?
These are all important questions that need to be thrashed out long before handing account information over, and it’s probably a bit much to put the onus on the recipient to start bolting security gates you may have left wide open. Do some pre-handover diligence, and make some time to ensure everything is locked down tight. If there’s anything hugely important you need them to know, tell them in advance—don’t hand over a hard drive and ask them why they didn’t make a backup two months after the thing has fallen into the bathtub.
That’s the grim stuff out of the way. What happens to accounts you’ve invested a ton of money in? You may have bought a lot of digital purchases tied to certain platforms. Games on Steam, or music on iTunes or Spotify—they’re all tied to specific logins in your name. When you die, what happens to the purchases? In the real world, you end up with a ton of dusty boxes. Online? Those “boxes” will be taken away from you.
In an ideal scenario, you could nominate someone to take over a digital account and they’d inherit the purchases. But legally, when you go, so do your files (in as much as anything you can’t download and keep locally is gone forever.) That’s because you’re buying into a license to use a thing, as opposed to buying the thing itself. I did have a whole pile of text for this bit, but as it turns out, the ground has already been thoroughly covered.
Logan’s Run, the sci-fi movie from 1976 where everyone has a timer ticking down till they hit the age of 30, is weirdly relevant to this discussion because ticking timers are most definitely going to be a thing. See, there’s nothing stopping someone from passing on a login to a family member so they can continue to make use of all the purchased content. The platform owners are never going to know about it. However, as those wheels of time continue to crank, at some point somebody is going to wonder why Steve McHuman is still playing games at the ripe old age of 123.
This is why I predict that at some point, all of our digital accounts tied to financial purchases will have some sort of average human lifespan timer attached to them. The moment it wanders past 100 or so years? Poof, gone. I mean, this is better than being chased down by a Sandman once you hit 30, but it does mean your digital purchases will almost certainly expire at a later date—and that’s assuming the services of today are even around in 100 years time.
Well, not quite so dismal. Sorry, Milton. We’re in a bit of an odd situation at the moment, as we’re now well into the point in history where we have the last generation to know life before 24/7 Internet. For many, being online is an absolutely crucial resource of existence. Meanwhile, Internet of Things technology ensures it continues to leap from behind a screen to the real world. We can’t escape it, no more than we can somehow skip around Milton’s cave, and the younger generations absolutely will demand reforms to the way we think about digital content, ownership, and inheritance.
I just hope I’m around to see it. And if I’m not? Please, don’t touch my stuff.
This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog post authored by Christopher Boyd. Read the original post at: Malwarebytes Labs