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??