What happens to the digital us when we shuffle of this mortal coil, I mean if your number was called in the heavenly bingo today – what would happen to the digital you? By that I mean, what provision have you made for all things digital in the event of your demise or becoming incapacitated in a way that prevented access to the digital you?
I’ve pretty much learned how difficult things can be in the digital world when something untoward happens, it has taken quite a lot of time to sort out the sixty or so accounts that I effectively lost access to. In truth none of these were hugely important, but if I’d lost access to them all – e.g. the email accounts where password resets go, the two factor authentication – thankfully not misplaced and all the other stuff that makes up the digital me it would have been a disaster for me and the family.
I have thought about a “digital will” in the past and a “digital heir”, but never quite got round to it. That’s about to change, maybe not the digital will in the short term, but definitely the digital heir. Finding someone to manage it all is quite a though provoking process, I mean if you hand over the credentials to the online banking – you have to hand them over to someone trustworthy. The bank would say don’t do this under any circumstances, I fully understand that – but then the banks don’t have to ensure that your dependents can pay the bills and put food on the table. It boils down to the fact that if the money is in the bank account, the bank quite rightly treats it as their money – but the bank has no social aspect to it’s money management and it certainly doesn’t behave in a manner beneficial to dependents unless it’s told to.
I would follow protocol and have someone advise the bank that I’m deceased, but for the fact that my brother who died 20 years ago was receiving letters addressed to “Mr Deceased” at my Mothers address for quite some time after his death and I may as well tell you that it was pretty upsetting for all concerned – a personal visit to the bank soon pinpointed the culprit. Apparently it was the computer wot did it, naughty computer!
So as far as financial matters go, the accounts will stay in place and access will be granted to my digital heirs in the first instance. I’m not sure what instructions I’ll issue, but I do know from experience that telling someone like the bank that you’re deceased will usually end up with individual accounts being locked until probate is sorted out – I know of cases where this has taken years. So the bank will be able to lock the empty accounts and close them at it’s leisure, unless the account is overdrawn and then they can wait for probate to be settled.
I’d never been a fan of password managers, but recent events have caused me to reconsider that position – so I’ll probably have a password vault of some kind – with someone “my digital heir or heirs” who knows the password to it. Or I could just do things the old fashioned way and keep a thin notebook under the keyboard with all the credentials written down in it.
I haven’t checked what the Legal Profession can provide service wise in this field, I probably wont do that – my personal experience of most Lawyers is that they tend to be not very good. Also I think that the Marx Brothers summed it up in their radio sitcom from the 1930’s, with a law practice called Shyster, Shyster and Flywheel.