TOPEKA, Kan. (KSNT) – The saying goes “you can’t live forever” — or can you? Many of us live our lives in the digital world, but what happens to all that information and the photos you post to social media after you pass away? When it comes to your […]
Click here to view original web page at Contact Our Walworth County Estate Planning Attorney
Are you addressing your digital assets when planning your Walworth County estate? Digital assets do not solely affect younger generations, they affect all generations. Now that our digital world involves social media, emails, online investing, cloud storage, and more, you must address what will happen to your digital assets after your death.
In general, digital assets consist of any type of information stored online, in the cloud, or on a person’s computer, phone, or server. Samples of digital assets are: emails (Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail), online investing information (E*Trade), online financial information, online bank accounts, online bill payment accounts (PayPal), social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), online photos, online videos, blogs, websites, domain names, online video game accounts, avatars, medical and prescription information (Patient Portals, Walgreens), all files storage on your computer, your smartphone data (address book, contacts, photos), etc. Some people may have digital assets with a monetary value, such as online businesses, photographers, authors, etc. Your digital property and memories will be lost if family members are unable to retrieve and access your data.
Traditionally, financial information and bills are sorted at the deceased’s estate. In today’s day and age, many people pay bills online, through the creditor website or through their bank’s online bill pay program. With so many companies going paperless, all of your estate assets and debts may be inaccessible strictly through a paper trail.
If you have a social media profile, such as on Facebook, what will happen to your profile? You must leave specific instructions and login information for family if you want a say in what happens to your Facebook profile. If you do nothing, family may argue about whether to leave your page as a memorial or to delete it. There may be strong feelings attached to these options. If no one has your login information after your death, your family must contact Facebook to have your profile either removed or memorialized. Which would you prefer? Which would your family prefer?
Lastly, many states do not have laws enacted to protect digital assets after your death. Who will own this information? Your photos, videos, and family recipes are at risk. Is the information transferable?
The fact is that Wisconsin is not keeping up with how digital assets are handled in an estate after a death. This will create stress, arguments, confusion, and possible extra expenses for your living family. Your first step is to prepare a list of all your digital assets and login information. Contact our Walworth County estate planning attorney to ensure the Personal Representative of your Last Will & Testament is given the proper information and instructions to manage your digital assets. You can contact our Walworth County estate planning attorney via phone at 262-725-0175 and via email on our website’s contact page. Wynn at Law, LLC has estate planning offices located in Delavan, Salem, Lake Geneva, and Muskego.
Click here to view original web page at How to Manage a Client’s Digital Estate After Death
In our exploding digital world, it’s essential to help clients plan for both their real-life and digital estates.
There are many questions involved: Who’s in charge when it comes to digital property? Who wants to approach a widow who is grieving about taking down the deceased’s account? Do family members have the right to access their loved one’s account after a death? Would the individual who has passed want family members to access their content, or to have the account removed? Is it possible to commemorate the person by memorializing the accounts?
These conversations can go well beyond the topic of social media. It’s important to consider all the digital assets of the deceased, including email accounts and websites for online bill paying, retail accounts such as PayPal and photo sharing accounts. These sites contain sensitive personal information and financial data that could pose privacy concerns if left unattended indefinitely.
PLANNING TIPS
Here are some pointers to pass along to clients and their families, and tips for you to consider for your own planning needs.
First, consider the key questions to ask your clients:
What social media platforms do you use?
What are your passwords?
What would you like to happen to these accounts after you die?
Then:
Document the Stated Goals. And, if applicable, share these with the client’s attorney or whomever your client names as their “digital executor.”
Leverage Technology. There are many client portals available today to house important client documents.
Provide Legal Documentation. When individuals pass suddenly, or if they haven’t outlined their wishes for terminating a social media account, each of the major social media channels will typically request legal documentation in order to begin the closure process (check out this helpful infographic from Mashable).
DELETING DIGITAL ASSETS
However, this is a very new area, and each of these sites is in its infancy in terms of putting together policies. We have heard heartbreaking stories of people who put all their photos on Facebook and haven’t provided anyone with a password. Upon their passing, Facebook was not able to give the family access to the account, and all the photos were lost.
Here’s a quick rundown of what is required by the most popular networking sites when discontinuing a social media account:
Facebook: Facebook has two options for what to do with a deceased family member’s account.
LinkedIn: There are two options to handle a deceased person’s account.
Twitter: Twitter will work with the estate to remove an account.
YouTube: As YouTube is affiliated with Google, you must reference the policies on Google’s site. It provides for a number of options, including closing the account and requesting funds from the account.
Keep in mind that social media accounts often change their policies, and it’s important to revisit procedures even after you’ve had a conversation about terminating an account.
ADVISOR’S ROLE?
You might wonder if discussing social media with your clients should actually be part of your role as a financial advisor. I believe this is a major planning need for your clients, and one they may not be thinking about. As an advisor, your role in these sensitive conversations about a little-understood space is a key one – and may help you to stand out from the competition.
I believe it will eventually become commonplace to discuss social media and a client’s digital footprint when preparing long-term financial plans and wills. Right now, most people don’t know where to start.
And one thing is certain — no one wants to put their loved ones in the awkward position of having to decide what to do with their accounts during the difficult period following a death.
Amy Sitnick is the social media contributor for Practically Speaking and also serves as a Senior Marketing Manager for the SEI Advisor Network.
Click here to view original web page at Have you named your Facebook heir yet?
Let us ask you two questions: do you have any social media account? Have you named your Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn heir yet? If the answer to the last question is no, you might be interested in reading more. Obviously, we do not want you to be thinking of your death for the 2 minutes that will take you to read this blog, but this is something that will happen to us all.
Early last year Facebook allowed their users in the United States to plan what do they wanted to do with their accounts once they have died. This facility was soon rolled out to the rest of the world and brought to mind the importance of what will happen to a person’s digital assets once that person has passed away. We could define “digital assets” as everything we upload to the internet and, along with other assets, it is important to plan what we want to do with them once we are deceased.
Digital assets must be included in people’s wills with the instructions that the executors should carry out after a person has passed away.
Some of the social media platforms include in their terms and conditions the possibility to say how this specific asset will be dealt with after a person’s death or when there has been no activity in the account for a certain period of time.
Generally, these assets will only have sentimental value so they can be left to family and friends as a gift of personal possession.
This, obviously, is different if such photos or videos have any monetary value.
There are some rules for certain social media platforms. For example, Twitter removes images of a deceased person in restricted circumstances.
Here some people might have information that could cause distress to their loved ones after their death. This information should be deleted in lifetime.
People who own businesses should carefully handle how the emails will be accessed after death. Although this can lead in a more in depth discussion relating to business succession plans.
It should be treated identically to paper records and it covers everything from blogs to domain names, gaming avatars, online books.
This is a short guide on how to treat your digital assets. Should you need more information, you can contact our expert team of solicitors dealing with wills. They can guide you on what to do with your online assets with advice tailored to your own circumstances and needs.
Click here to view original web page at Get Ready for Your Digital Model
Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you from it might seem to be an odd or even dangerous idea, but we’ll all soon take it for granted.
A decade from now, your personal model will be more indispensable than your smartphone, and the company that provides it may well be the world’s first trillion-dollar business. So it is time to start getting acquainted with our digital alter egos—and what they’ll mean for our lives.
Today, several different companies gather information about you and use machine-learning algorithms—computer programs that build models from data—to predict what you may want to buy and figure out how to sell stuff to you.
Privacy concerns aside, this poses two problems. First, companies have a conflict of interest: They want to serve you, but they also want to make money.
For example, Google predicts how likely you are to click on an ad to show you the most profitable ones. The choice also depends on the advertisers’ bids, but you’d probably rather just see the ads most relevant to you. Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that Google wants to be the third half of your brain, but nobody wants part of their brain constantly trying to show them ads.
The second problem is that a model of you derived from fragments of your data—Google’s model based on your searches, Amazon’s from your purchases and so on—can only ever have a very limited understanding of who you are and what you want. A single model assembled from all the data you’ve ever produced would be much more accurate: The more data, the better the model. For privacy reasons, you’d want the data and the model under your control, not a third party’s.
Soon enough, facing the fog of life without a good model to guide you will seem unendurable.
To solve both of these problems, we need a new kind of company that is to your data like your bank is to your money—storing it, keeping it safe and investing it on your behalf. For a subscription fee, such a firm would record your every interaction with the digital world, build and maintain a 360-degree model of you, and use it to negotiate with other people’s models.
No major technical obstacles would prevent doing this: The main requirement would be routing your interactions through what’s called a proxy server. If all your interactions with the digital world—through your smartphone, desktop computer or any other device—pass through a “middleman” computer in the cloud en route to their destination, the middleman can record them all.
The companies that now offer to consolidate all your data somewhere in the cloud are forerunners of tomorrow’s personal databanks. Once a firm has your data in one place, it can create a complete model of you using one of the major machine-learning techniques: inducing rules, mimicking the way neurons in the brain learn, simulating evolution, probabilistically weighing the evidence for different hypotheses or reasoning by analogy. Then you can go to town with your model, which you’d own and control like you do your money, rather than letting companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook FB -3.77 % fight for control of it.
With this in mind, here’s a future suggestion for LinkedIn: Add a “Find Me a Job” button. When you click it, your digital model would “interview” instantly for all the open positions that match your specifications, interacting at high speed with human-resources departments’ recruiting models. LinkedIn could then return a list of the most promising jobs for you.
While one copy of your model is doing this, another online alter ego could be looking for a car for you, exhaustively researching the options and haggling with the auto-dealer bots so you don’t have to.
At any moment, millions of copies of your model could roam the Internet, doing all the things you’d do if only you had the time. From these, your model selects the best few options for you to choose—then learns from what you decided, making the model more accurate the next time around.
To offset organizations’ data-gathering advantages, like-minded individuals will pool the data in their banks and use the models learned from that information.
As the models improve, their interactions will become increasingly like real-world ones—just millions of times faster and in silicon. Your model will go on a thousand digital dates with each of a thousand possible spouses and rank them by how well the dates went.
Tomorrow’s cyberspace will be a society of models, a vast parallel world that selects only the most promising things to try out in the real one—the new, global subconscious of the human race.
This will all probably happen in years, not decades. Apple’s Siri, Microsoft MSFT -0.90 % ’s Cortana and Google Now all include efforts to build complete models of you from the data captured by your smartphone, and they’re making rapid progress. Like a personal assistant, they try to help you accomplish your daily tasks, either in response to your commands (Siri) or on their own (Google Now). But to do that, they need to understand you, and they’ll use any data they can to do so—from the smartphone’s sensors to your emails and calendar.
The Web pages you see every day are already the result of complex interactions among the models that content providers, advertising networks and advertisers are deriving. Learning algorithms trade against one another in the stock market. Last May, a Hong Kong venture fund named Deep Knowledge Ventures appointed an algorithm to its board, voting on investment decisions alongside the five human directors, according to Business Insider.
Today’s models don’t yet interact with us: You can’t tell them they’re wrong or ask them questions. Machine-learning algorithms are black boxes that only computer scientists can open up. But that will change as more of us realize how important machine learning is and demand a say in how it occurs.
Eventually, your model will be like your best friend, but with infinitely more patience. What will you ask it? You might not like some of its answers, but that would be all the more reason to ponder them. Your model—your digital half—might even help you become a better person.
—Dr. Domingos is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and the author of “The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World” (Basic Books).