Tag: estate plan

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

how to manage the digital legacy of the departed

Eleanore

In April, Google added to its services an Inactive Account Manager, which lets you designate an heir who will control your Google data when you die. You choose a length of inactivity, and if your accounts are ever quiet for that long, Google will notify your heirs that they’ve inherited access to your Gmail correspondence, YouTube videos or Picasa photo albums — whatever you specify.

It’s about time that Internet giants get in front of the privacy issue and offer users options for dealing with a digital legacy. After all, we live in an age where an increasing number of people make and share materials that live only in the digital world — nearly 50 percent of adult Internet users, for example, post homemade photos or videos online. A number of services can help with digital estate planning by designating password recipients or deleting accounts or files when you die. But communication and privacy laws have yet to catch up with technology. WhileFacebook made it possible for family members to convert the page of a loved one into a memorial a few years ago, the company has faced multiple lawsuits from family members who wanted deeper access to their kids’ Facebook accounts after a sudden death.

Clearly it’s important for people to consider who will have access and control over their digital data when the time comes. But this focus on privacy and access ignores the emotional significance of a loved one’s digital legacy.

“Right now the contemporary discussion is privacy and utility,” says Will Odom of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “It’s not about how digital materials will be represented in any meaningful way.”

Think about how we interact with material heirlooms, items that are often deeply symbolic and sentimental. Your great-grandfather’s watch, an old photo album or stack of letters might be kept in special box on a high shelf or tucked in a particular drawer. We safeguard these items not just to remember the individual, but so future generations will know and remember too. And when the living ache to connect to the dead, it’s often in a ritualized setting: Letters might be read in a favorite chair with a glass of wine and a box of tissues. Photo albums are pulled out during holidays. We keep our relationships with lost loved ones alive by keeping their things.

Digital possessions — be they e-mails, texts, photos or tweets — are fundamentally different than tangible goods, says Odom, who has been investigating bereavement in the digital age. This makes digital materials particularly challenging to deal with after death. For one thing, there’s a matter of scale. Your house or apartment can contain only so many objects. People continuously get rid of tangible things as they acquire new ones, keeping only what’s important. But digital objects are spaceless. You don’t have to purge even if your inbox is bloated with thousands of unread e-mails. So it’s easy to end up with orders of magnitude more digital things than tangible ones. Digital objects are also oddly removed from view. While you can discern with a glance that the stacks of ancient National Geographic magazines in your parent’s attic are indeed stacks of ancient National Geographic magazines, you can’t tell what’s on a laptop and whether you want to keep that content just by looking at the laptop. This makes it especially difficult to make decisions about digital heirlooms.

“People end up in a weird holding pattern of keeping a phone or a desktop computer,” Odom says. “They want to keep it, but they are too overwhelmed to go into it.”

Recent studies by Odom and colleagues suggest that there may be something fundamental and ancient about how we interact with items left behind by the dead. While there currently aren’t easy ways to curate digital heirlooms, people sure do try. Many of the people the researchers interviewed were enacting similar rituals with digital objects that people use with material ones. One woman had 25 or so cherished text messages from her dead husband. She kept the SIM card and old phone in an ornate box and would take them out and read them from time to time. A woman from England buried her husband with his cell phone and kept sending him texts after he died.

Odom and his colleagues conclude that bereavement in the digital age might be easier if we had devices that allowed us to interact with digital objects in the same ways humans have interacted with heirlooms through the ages. As one woman who didn’t like the idea of storing special digital photos on a CD remarked: “They deserve better than that.”

Based on comments like that one, the researchers have designed three devices that display a deceased person’s photos, tweets and other digital heirlooms on screens embedded in oak veneer boxes. In tests, families said that they would want to keep the devices alongside their cherished physical heirlooms. As one mother put it: “Seeing it age with them — the things we’ll always have — it feels right.”

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

Have You Completed Your Client’s Digital Estate Plan?

Eleanore

I’m sure you are comfortable that your clients’ estate plans are up to date. But have you reviewed your client’s digital estate plan? What is a digital estate plan? It’s a plan for the disposition of all your clients internet accounts once he or she is deceased

Experts have estimated that the average adult with access to the internet has more than 25 internet accounts! In the past, we kept albums full of snapshots, vinyl records and shoeboxes full of correspondence. Now our photos are all on Flickr and IPhoto, our music is downloaded from ITunes and our correspondence is email via Yahoo or Google.

And probably more important than that, a lot of your clients bank and investment accounts may be entirely online.!

And what happens if your client dies? Who has access to these internet accounts? And if they want those accounts taken off the internet how do they do it? You may discover that it is more difficult than you think to access their accounts or erase them from the internet

The family of Ricky Rash, a 15 year old who committed suicide in 2011, discovered how difficult it was to recover information from their deceased son’s internet account. In an effort to understand why he had taken his own life, they requested but were refused access to his Facebook account. Facebook claimed that according to the Stored Communications Act of 1986 – the federal law that governs the protection of a person’s electronic data – even the account of a minor is protected from access by his parents or anyone else.  Other sites and providers interpret the legislation this way, making access all but impossible.

There are only five states that have taken any steps to help recover the internet data of a deceased person—Indiana, Idaho and Oklahoma legislation covers social media and blogging accounts, while Connecticut and Rhode Island legislation covers only email.

What does this mean for your clients? It is critical that they create a digital estate plan.The listing of internet accounts needs to be more comprehensive than I originally recommended. Information must include:

  • the name of the account
  • the contents of the account
  • the URL address
  • username
  • password
  • instructions for the disposition of the account including the person to oversee such disposition.
Digital planning
Digital planning

There is a whole new industry that has been created to service your clients’ digital estate , a new digital estate planning service. Your clients can create an account and then enter their user names, passwords and wishes for each of their digital assets. They can specify an heir for each account; Legacy Locker will provide heirs with information after the account holder’s death is verified.

There are also online memorial services to celebrate your client’s life. These services enable your clients to create their own memorials before they pass away. Facebook and Twitter also offer these services for family members.

The importance of having a digital estate plan will increase as more and more of our assets (and access to assets) are online. Gradually laws will evolve to give family members access to deceased loved ones’ accounts. It is important to prepare your clients for the disposition of their digital assets now so that family members will not be unpleasantly surprised when they attempt to uncover them.

If you want to explore digital estate planning in more detail feel free to wander around.

Is AI The Key To Eternal Life?

Texas estate planning should include digital life

Eleanore

In Texas, many people have become aware that they should create an estate plan that deals with the distribution of their assets when they die. In fact, the same people know that common tools in estate planning include a will or trust. However, what they may not know is that the on-line estate of a person is as important as that of the physical estate when working to create a comprehensive plan.

A digital estate includes both traditional assets like money and more emotionally related, sentimental items, like photo storage sites. These can all be dealt with in estate planning documents. For example, Google has a method in which an account owner can set who and how their accounts can be accessed when they die. Other websites have similar options available.

Important for those left behind is the information as to what on-line accounts exist. This can be included in estate planning documents. The details about the accounts should be updated regularly as people add accounts and information to the web. In addition, passwords should be kept separately, and out of the estate planning materials that can become public at the time of death and probate.

Estate planning may seem overwhelming to some in Texas. This is because of the difficulty in ensuring that all assets have been accounted for and that the plan that they create is complete. To be sure that this is the case, it may be helpful for an individual to review all available options and seek advice from those with experience in estate planning.

The importance of digital asset planning explained

Digital estate planning

Eleanore

“Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.” — Marlon Brando

Bricks and mortar businesses are inexorably coming to the realisation that a substantial amount of their business value is intangibly trapped in information. For online businesses, practically 100% of their assets are made up of information and the most valuable of all happens to be related to individuals. Information such as visitor, member, and client contact details are eagerly captured by online companies. The deeper and more detailed it gets, the better it is for the online enterprise. The ability to create an accurate client profile is true power and online businesses know it. They fight tooth and nail to attract new members, sign up subscribers and remain in front of as many contacts as possible. Individuals’ contact information and whatever other identity-related data they can cram into their customer databases is precious and allows them to put a value on their company, even if that value is largely theoretical.

If companies go through all this trouble to get data, would it not follow that their executives would rather part with their coveted reserved parking spots before they  consider allowing a single, hard-earned entry to be removed from their customer relationship management database? Absolutely! As long as the online businesses we deal with are subject to a privacy law based on the OECD data protection principles, we can count on the fact that limited retention is legislated and should expect our data to be purged from their systems after a ‘reasonable period of time’. What we should concern ourselves with is keeping track of all the data that is out there in detailed online and offline profiles. Social networking sites, email systems, other data sharing systems, e-commerce marketplaces and online auctions all try to build detailed profiles to allow for customisation of marketing messages, the likes of which deliver real value to online advertisers.

With the near complete penetration of the Internet across all age groups, we are increasingly likely to hear the term ‘digital estate planning’ (DEP) from tech-savvy lawyers. A search for this term yields a mere 70 hits on Google at the time of this writing, but give it a try in a year or two, and it be entrenched in the legal vernacular.

With our information now spread across dozens, perhaps hundreds of Internet sites and corresponding numbers of back-end databases, DEP is easier said than done. Social networking sites such as Facebook likely consider their early policy of ‘no deletion, only deactivation’ to have been a key driver of explosive growth as their user base shot past 100 million. Other sites that may have been more ethically inclined did not have the same opportunity to rekindle relationships with returning users. With global pressure to adopt data protection best practices, more and more firms are finding that they need to offer options for purging individual information from their systems.

The potentially vast amounts of information about deceased, Internet-active individuals may well turn into an insurmountable task for many, or an expensive task for a legal professional who wants to delve into DEP provisioning. Sites such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Google all allow next-of-kin access to the deceased party’s information upon presentation of proof of death and proof of relationship, but a process needs to exist to manage all such related activities. Such a process can be based on a solid foundation of privacy legislation but, from the subject’s perspective, it must be consistent with existing best practices for password management and profile maintenance.

It is important to remember that information represents the building blocks of our identity and beyond the proper disposal of our data-based estate resides the very real threat of identity theft. That threat is real and has been for years. Husnain Kazmi is Vice President for Bank of America in Southern California. Kazmi says that in 2004 alone, some 400,000 checking accounts were reportedly opened in the US and millions of dollars in car loans were approved in the names of deceased individuals. This particularly effective type of identity theft is called ‘ghosting’ and most often occurs as a result of orphaned data being harvested by IT-savvy criminals looking to profit.

Governments need to step in and proactively install legislation that will protect citizens. Provinces in Canada, for example, are taking steps to establish privacy legislation around medical records. Many in the health care system view the legislation as crucial to the successful implementation of the Pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record (EHR) system under development across the country.

Following best practices is vital, but not enough. While the discussion is rather morbid, we must encourage clients and loved ones to exercise common sense when writing obituaries and safeguarding death certificates. Donald Kerr, Deputy Director of National Intelligence in America, is quoted as stating the following on the Office of the Director of Naval Intelligence website, “Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it is an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture… but in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past… we need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment. Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that.”

We may all soon be in need of an internet-savvy, privacy aware, digital estate planner.