An interesting article went live on the NYT Gadgetwise blog yesterday about a subject near and dear to our business; specifically the piece was about dealing with the digital afterlife, and what is referred to as “morning after” messaging. The article referred to Legacy Locker (and a few other sites) and stated “many of them charge an annual fee and there’s no guarantee that the companies will outlast your lifetime.” Following that brusque dismissal, the focus of the piece is on the opinion of Adele McAlear, a marketing and social media expert.
Adele raises many excellent questions regarding digital life and the importance of planning for the future of your digital assets. She also provides several suggestions on how to plan for that future. However, we believe that while the advice is good in theory, the practical implications are fairly lacking, here are some specific examples.
From Gadget Wise:
“Ms. McAlear recommends leaving your final instructions as an encrypted file on your computer or place them in a sealed envelope or safety deposit box. ‘Just make sure that your digital executor knows where to look and will remember the password,’ she said.”
This sounds like a great idea – except that practically speaking, there’s no easy way to do any of those things. An encrypted file on a computer is subject to security breaches, hard drive failures, accidental deletion, and a host of other issues. And finding a digital executor who “knows where to look and will remember the password…”? Sounds good, but it’s missing the “How, exactly, would this happen?” It’s a great suggestion with no practical way to execute it.
In my case for instance, nobody knows how my computer’s folder structure works except me. My PC is personal and private, both by intention and by happenstance. By the same token, I wouldn’t be able to find anything on my wife’s computer unless she tells me where to look. Also, it’s entirely possible that I don’t want a single individual to administer all of my accounts. Maybe my wife should handle my Facebook and my email accounts, but my close friend and business partner should administer my blog or sell my domain names.
Essentially, what this post is suggesting is precisely what Legacy Locker does, only without the infrastructure or processes, and without any security, backup, redundancy, or ease of access. Consider:
- Legacy Locker lets you add as many individual accounts (“digital assets”) as you like, including things like your email addresses, your Flickr and Facebook, even the password to your PC
- Each of those assets can be assigned to different beneficiaries who will administer those accounts, and each asset can include accompanying instructions like “please delete my profile here” or “please contact all my friends to let them know when the funeral will take place”
- Legacy Locker has secure encryption and redundant storage for these assets to make sure no gets access to them until they’re supposed to
- Only the information specified will go to a given beneficiary, and you can select as many beneficiaries as you like
- Information and assets are automatically delivered after the account holder’s death is confirmed. That’s as opposed to a letter in a safety deposit box that might lie unopened, or an encrypted file that’s likely to stay encrypted because someone forgot the password
The post further suggests that everyone
“… keep an inventory of all your log-ins and passwords for all your accounts, such as e-mail, social networks, photo- and video-sharing sites, blogs, Web sites, forums, online gaming, Skype, IM, PayPal, eBay and so on.”
My question is, where should they keep that stuff? In an excel spreadsheet on your hard drive? That’s subject to theft, failure, corrupted files, loss, accidental deletion, and numerous other dangers. Write them down on scraps of paper and keep them in your safety deposit box? That’s incredibly inefficient, hard to update, and hard to keep track of (I can’t even think of the last time I went to my bank’s branch during work hours – can you?).
The post also tells us to
“Be sure to specify what you would like to be done with your digital legacy. Do you want your accounts closed? Status changed? Avatars removed?”
Again, while we agree that this is the right thing to do, we think Legacy Locker is the simplest, most straightforward way to actually get it done. Our service allows you to, in a simple, step-by-step manner, methodically add all of your digital assets to your locker, create special instructions, and specify the appropriate recipient to a given asset. Without Legacy Locker, a person concerned with their digital accounts after their passing have a lot of hoops to jump through in order to ensure that:
- their digital assets are accounted for
- there’s a good way for someone to actually receive those assets
- the storage and eventual transfer of that information is secure, redundant and up to date
Towards the end, an additional suggestion reads:
“You would do best to choose someone who is Internet savvy and understands how social networks and online accounts function…”
Once again, that’s a great suggestion. But those people don’t exactly grow on trees. Not everyone has access to a trusted person who who is a social media expert and techno-whiz, and is also a person with whom you trust your entire digital life. In some ways, this is like telling everyone that instead of seeing a doctor professionally, they should be friends with someone who has medical training and have them treat you when you’re ill. Or to be friends with someone who’s good at “fixing stuff” rather than see a mechanic when your car starts to spurt smoke from under the hood.
We live in a society of specialization, where professionals become educated and experts in their respective fields. Legacy Locker is a team of experts who specialize in the best, most secure way to transfer digital information in the event of death or disability. Trying to ad-hoc a process for transferring critical information is likely to result in loss of data, security failure, and / or a serious imposition on someone you’re trying to shoe-horn into a role that may not be comfortable for them. Legacy Locker allows you to break parts of your digital legacy into discrete chunks, store and transfer those securely, and apportion them to the people most appropriate to a given task.
We started Legacy Locker for a reason. There simply was no good way to ensure that the content, accounts, information and other paraphernalia of digital life will be managed or transferred in the event of your death. We agree with every one of the concerns raised in the NYT article – it’s precisely because of those same concerns that we started this company. We take this problem very seriously, and we work hand in hand with estate planning attorneys and other estate planning professionals to ensure that we are in lock step with the practical realities of digital estate planning. These are the right questions. But without Legacy Locker, they’re not the right answers.
Uncategorized No Comments
