Tag: Electronic assets

Digital Legacy: What happens to your Facebook account?

Digital Legacy: What happens to your Facebook account?

Eleanore

Even the most diligent planner can miss an important element of planning for end-of-life: protecting your digital legacy.

What that means is that when the time comes, your loved ones may have a very difficult time figuring out what to do with all your electronic assets. As the world becomes more and more dependent on virtual tools to handle day-to-day business, it becomes extremely important that you make arrangements to protect your digital legacy.

Read more about protecting your Digital Legacy on Funeralwise.com

In a recent article published in The Atlantic, Jake Swearingen shares his story of how he went about tackling the subject with his own parents.

My parents have always been upfront with me about their wishes for when they die. I can remember talking about cremation, living wills, and Do Not Resuscitate orders way back in middle school. But when a PR pitch came across my inbox, announcing that in a recent survey only 16 percent of baby boomers had considered their “digital legacy” and only 3 percent had taken steps to prepare their family, I realized: I had no idea what my own boomer parents wanted done with their online footprints. Curious, I called them up and had a remarkably cheerful chat about what to do with their social-media remnants.

Read the full story: What I’ll Do With My Parents’ Facebook After They Die

It is taking a while for estate laws to catch up with the online world so many “do it yourself” estate planning documents don’t handle electronic accounts well. Eventually, estate planning will catch up. In the meantime, you should make sure that you have provided a trusted family member or friend with the information they need to take care of your online footprint the way you want. There are tools available to help you, such as the funeralwise.com digital legacy checklist and record book. Your estate attorney may also have suggestions on how you should manage your electronic assets. The important thing is that you pass along your wishes.

Protecting Your Digital Estate After Death

Protecting Your Digital Estate After Death

Eleanore

Estate law has roots that go back a thousand years into the British legal system, but the changes in technology are flipping these laws on their ear. The average American’s digital footprint is valued around $55,000, notes the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. The majority of people do not have a plan for their digital assets and the laws are too antiquated to handle the process. This lack of forethought leaves the deceased at risk of posthumous identity theft, loss of transferable assets, and digital fraud.

What Is A Digital Estate?

In the Science Technology Law Journal, researcher Jamie Patrick Hopkins defines a digital estate as anything that only exists in a binary form of numeric encoding. These include uploaded photographs, electronic documents, emails, and software. These are all potential intellectual properties that are floating around the Internet after death. Intellectual properties can be big money. A report by the National Bureau of Asian Research shows intellectual property fraud in the United States can exceed $300 million. Digital estates hold many of these intellectual properties, but the decedent often does not plan to secure and bequeath the property. Instead, these properties become part of an inadequate legal system.

Laws Governing Digital Property

Out of 50 states, 31 have no laws on the books that specifically govern digital estates, reports Everplans. Other states, like Delaware, have enacted legislation that allows fiduciary access to digital accounts. The implications of these laws are huge. Imagine a hotly contested inheritance between spouse and children. One claims there is a picture on the dead person’s phone that will prove the case. The states that have these new laws on the books will give legal status for people to get account passwords and information that would be the deciding factors in cases like this.

The National Conference Of Commissioners On Uniform State Laws is trying to codify this patchwork system throughout the states. It is called the Fiduciary Access To Digital Access Actand the draft gives guidelines on how the states will release digital information to attorneys, trustees, and beneficiaries of an estate.

Protecting Your Digital Estate

All estate planning has one rule: start when you are still alive. Yes, there is a certain amount of obviousness to the rule but the newness of digital laws makes this even more important. You no longer have the luxury of allowing the established laws to handle your estate. Include all of your intellectual and digital property in your will, including passwords. Internet security company LifeLock recommends changing your password often. This is good information for protecting your electronic assets, but make sure to give permission to access your accounts after your death.

Digital assets need to be enumerated in your will or trust. Some of the specifics need to include file names and descriptions of intellectual properties, account permissions, and image usage criteria. Also remember that wills are public record so a trust may be a safer way to transfer digital rights.

Digital Files After Death, What Happens to Your Digital Legacy?

Electronic assets

Eleanore

Electrons and pieces of magnetic stuff are replacing the usual asset. In the electronic realm, you are constantly generating assets: emails, tweets, pictures on flickr, short messages on facebook, or videos on youtube.

“Online, we generate a lot of assets, but we don’t think of them as assets,” says Eric Goldman, a professor of law and director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law in California. “We don’t manage them as assets. We create content. We create data. We develop relationships. All of those things are valuable, but we don’t manage them as valuable assets.”

The ease of creation (and consumption) online is making us create content everyday. But the tools we are using to do so are protecting our privacy with passwords ; our signatures are replaced by puny text strings that we have to remember each time we are using a different creation medium.

But once you pass away, who will be able to receive your electronic assets if they don’t have the key??