Note: This is a guest post by Justin Toladro of Life Insurance Finder from Australia
A legacy has been part of human nature since the beginning of time. Old wisdom prescribed ‘planting a tree’ and bearing a son to carry on a legacy, to gain a sense of immortality, and to leave something behind that is sure to outlive us.
Many write books, blogs, and have obtained a strong online presence, which equates to a lengthy and diverse digital legacy.
A digital legacy is quite different than a physical legacy that includes a son, or a tree or any other kind of physical treasure. It is a part of us that contains our innermost thoughts, our political and religious beliefs, our love letters and what makes us who we are. It is something that is not quite tangible, but yet, is accessible.
Yet, to some of our friends and family, this digital legacy, with all of its photographs, mementos, emails and posts, may be an even more satisfying and lasting memory of our lives and how we lived them, to pass on to our children, grandchildren and friends and loved ones.
We live in a digital world that is rapidly replacing the physical word, as far as documentation, and personal data. Everything is emailed, faxed and downloaded, and most of us even pay our bills online, and carry on all of our financial matters there as well.
But what happens to that legacy when we die? Where does it go and what remains of our digital selves after our Digital Death?
Why digital data should be preserved:
When someone dies, most of the digital information that they created and participated in, such as profiles in many of the social network sites, or business identities, stays behind.
Deciding what part of your digital self you’d like to see remain can mean what part of your personal legacy you leave behind. The decision of course, is yours, but what if you die before you make a decision about that digital legacy? What is left of you after your death if there are no instructions in which to guide your legacy?
And what exactly is out there to see that you’d not be particularly proud?
Importance of digital data:
Mark Raby of TG Daily, says “38% of Americans would rather lose their wedding ring than all the files on their computer, and that’s just the beginning of the insights provided by a new study on the importance of digital data.” Although these statistics are sketchy, I mean how many people are going to admit this? The truth is, our computers and data are what most of our lives revolve around. Everything we do, care about, feel and believe are resting somewhere out in cyberspace.
Preserving your digital data:
Raby says that most people do not even back up this critical data. So, a great start would be a back up system to ensure that those critical photos, documents, music and other online information is safe, and will not be lost should you experience a hard drive crash.
Another method many people use is a ‘flash drive’. This is an exterior drive that condenses your information and stores it off the computer should a crash occur, and can act as a guide for family and friends, as well. It can contain sensitive information that can be locked in a safe, or other secure method to be opened upon your death.
Digital Will:
This is one document that will not only benefit you and how you want to leave your digital legacy, whether it remains or is removed after your death, and is also a guideline to how you want your family to see your legacy. Do you want personal information left in email accounts, or social network sites?
This is the place to state your wishes, and also give family and friends access to what you feel is appropriate.
Creating a digital will is not difficult, most times it is just attached to an existing will or living trust.
Start a list and keep it updated:
Making a list of all of your online activities for a month would be a great start to recording and keeping the important digital legacy that is you. Suggestions are to begin by creating a document in a word processing system, which allows links to specific sites.
Adding user ID’s and passwords, as well as what data is there can relieve even the most computer savvy person, when and if something happens to you.
This document should be incorporated into the digital will you’ve created and should be kept with a person you trust, or a legal representative to be given access only to the people you have chosen to give access.
Keeping your online data safe, stored, easily accessible and edited for content will leave a lasting digital legacy for which you can be proud.
- Tags:
- death insurance · digital death · Digital Estate Planning · life insurance
On Monday, Ryan Dunn of Jackass fame was killing when he crashed his Porsche while driving drunk and going over 132 mph. The photos of his car were unrecognizable. On Monday, right after he died, he had about 30,000 Twitter followers. Two days later, he has close to 130,000. An incriminating picture of Dunn drinking beers with his friends 2 hours before the crash has been deleted.
Fans flooded to Facebook and Twitter to mourn Dunn’s death and over 100,000 people decided to follow him. Why is this? What’s the point of following a dead person who no longer going to be able to tweet? My guess is the 100,000 people who followed him after his death wanted to be closer to him and are using “follow” like a “facebook like” button. They obviously know that Dunn won’t be tweeting anymore, but want to show their support and their only options are to send an @reply to his account and follow him. Ever since the start of the internet, people have been expressing their loss online, but I think Twitter is an interesting development in human mourning. It’s a medium that allows people to reach out and connect so easily, but does not have a mechanism to deal with user deaths. It doesn’t have a mechanism to help people grieve. And like the rest of the Internet, it wasn’t built to have it.
Social networks are the first sites where death has become a major issue. Three Facebook users die every single minute. Our friends over at 1000 Memories created a way for people to remember the deceased online in a much better way that just following a dead person. They allow people to create memorial pages for deceased people and then others can view the memorial, comment and interact. I think we will see a proliferation of online services to deal with issues surrounding the internet and death. There has to be a better outlet for showing support and easing the pain of losing someone you cared about than follow their now defunct twitter account that will never send another tweet.
What do you think? Why do you think people follow people who die on Twitter? How do you think the internet will evolve to help deal with death?
HT: Javiera Quiroga
- Tags:
- dead twitter users · digital death · following dead people on twitter · ryan dunn death · ryan dunn twitter followers death · twitter following deaceased users
In December, Attorneys Nathan Dosch and Joseph W. Boucher of Neider and Boucher wrote an article called E-Legacy: Who Inherits Your Digital Assets? for Wisconsin Lawyer Magazine. This month, Wisconsin Lawyer picked the article as the Wisconsin Lawyer Article of the Year. The article talks about digital assets, who they relate to law practice and what attorneys should be doing about digital assets right now. From the award link:
Boucher and Dosch are being honored for their article “E-Legacy: Who Inherits Your Digital Assets?” (Dec. 2010). In selecting the article, the Dunn award subcommittee said, “This article provides an insight into a new and emerging area of the law that could have a huge impact for estate planning lawyers and their clients. The article explores the issues that are unique to electronic assets, and points out how current property, contract, and probate laws do not adequately address ‘digital assets.’ Finally, the authors provide suggestions on questions lawyers should consider when working with their clients and how to address these issues under current law.”
We are especially excited about this award because both Boucher and Dosch have worked with us from the very beginning of Entrustet. They helped us think about how to create a legal solution for both web users and attorneys. We believe that this award shows that attorneys are starting to take digital assets seriously and are starting to realize that digital assets are a big part of a person’s estate. They need to be taken care of in an estate plan or they risk being lost or deleted.
Check out the article and let us know what you think!
- Tags:
- Digital Estate Planning · e legacy · estate planning online accounts · joseph boucher digital assets · nathan dosch digital assets · neider boucher digital asssets · wisconsin lawyer digital assets
In October 2009, Facebook introduced the ability to memorialize an account of a deceased person. Previously, the only option was to completely delete the account. It’s been about a year and a half and Facebook still only allows profiles of dead people to be memorialized or deleted. Most people either don’t know that these options exist or don’t like what either of the options entail. The vast majority of Facebook profiles of deceased people stay active, prone to hackers, spam and still show up in the “please reconnect with this user” box on their friends’ profile.
So what exactly does memorializing the account of a deceased person actually do?
- People will no longer see the deceased person appear in their Suggestions
- Sets privacy settings so that only confirmed friends can see the memorialized profile or locate it in search
- Removes sensitive information such as contact information and status updates
- Prevents anyone from logging into it in the future
- Still enables friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance
It sounds good, expcept there are some significant problems with Facebook’s approach. There has been a backlash against memorialization, mostly because of four problems.
1. Removing Status Updates
Families have been devastated when they memorialize a profile and all status updates are lost. Families memorialize accounts to prevent hacking, but then lose all of their loved one’s information. For example, Rachel Cooper says:
My 19 year old son’s FB was memorialised to protect it from hacking following his sudden tragic death. There was absolutely no warning given about all his comments and postings being deleted. All his friends and our family have now been caused the additional pain of losing all his written contributions to our lives without having the opportunity to save them first. This is the age of the internet, where people don’t write letters any more, and for FB to remove them without reason or warning is unforgiveable.
2. Does not allow new friends
Many times, parents want to friend their deceased children after the fact so that they have more to remember them by. We’ve seen examples where parents have created new Facebook accounts solely in order to be able to view their deceased child’s profile. Memorialization does not allow this.
3. Does now allow curation
Current friends can still post on a memorialized Facebook profile. We’ve seen examples where friends have posted inappropriate or hurtful messages on the wall of a deceased user and since nobody can log in, the message stays up. If someone posts something hurtful on my Facebook wall, I can delete it while I am alive, but once a profile is memorialized, this option is no longer possible.
4. Not customizable
Memorialization is a one size fits all policy. It’s not customizable to the unique needs of each individual case. Some will want status updates to be deleted, others will want them to stay. Some will want to allow new friends, others will not. Some will want curation, others will not.
The one size fits all approach is not working. There are almost 100 comments from families of deceased Facebook users who are trying to preserve the memories of their deceased family members.
Our recommendations:
We believe that Facebook should create a third options to help families remember their loved ones. Facebook should allow people to nominate someone to curate their profile after they die. Facebook should also have an option that allows people to decide if they want their profile deleted, memorialized or transferred to someone who can curate it. Facebook should give people choice. We should be able to control our data and how we are remembered. The current options are not sufficient.
The Independent of the UK just wrote a great article called Memories Destroyed in a Flash, about how digital photos may not be as permanant as many people think. The article rightly points out that photos used to be printed, then stored in photo albums or shoe boxes, many times in the attic. When someone wanted to look at them, they would just find the prints and start to take a look.
Now, hardly anyone prints photos anymore, but we’re seeing more photos every single day. Between Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Internet users store millions of photos every single day. Most people think that all of these services will be around forever and that their photos are safe, but in reality, they are likely not. With over 375,000 US Facebook users dying every year, what happens to their photos? Who owns them? Who can download them and preserve them? What happens when the family wants access, but doesn’t have the username and passwords. The article talks about the elephant in the room, that nobody is willing to talk about: death. From the link:
There is, however, an elephant in the room when it comes to digital photo storage. Death. What happens when we die? A recent study in the US – the country with the most Facebook users – estimated that 375,000 American users die annually. And if their passwords go with them, the likelihood is that their pictures will be lost. There are sites such as Entrustet which organise an individual’s digital assets, and will give your passwords to your loved ones on your death, but the service costs money and takes time to set up. And so, unwittingly – or carelessly – in our search to safeguard our photos, we may be endangering them.
Even if we do sidestep the digital shredder by passing our passwords and hard drive to our families, the sheer number of pictures we keep has got curators and historians in a spin. “Our photographic legacy has increased exponentially in the last decade. We constantly take photos on our phones and cameras, and when we die and historians try to analyse them, they are going to have quite a task,” Doug Dodds says. Where once our archives might have consisted of several hundred photos when we die, most teenagers now have more than that on their Facebook profile. Interestingly, though, as Dodds points out, many photos will have “metadata” embedded in it. Unique numbers and GIS co-ordinates are in some instances tagged to photos, and this will help future generations to decipher their meaning. So it is by no means all bad for the historian.
For lots of people though, the merits and demerits of the various methods of storage are an irrelevance. It largely comes down to a matter of taste. Some people wouldn’t countenance reading a book on a Kindle or the news on the internet, and similarly many people don’t like the idea of viewing their photos on a screen. “It all comes down to what you like,” Williams says. “Some people still use their old film cameras, most have gone digital. Both produce beautiful images and it’s the same with photo storage. Both ways can be useful and charming. We shouldn’t get too hung up on how we save our pictures,” she says.”We just need to make sure we carry on saving them.”
If you want to make sure that your valuable digital family photos are transferred to your family after you pass away, we recommend that you create an inventory before you pass away. You can use Entrustet’s free Account Guardian to make your list and store your usernames and passwords so that your family will have access. You should also consider storing offline backups of all of your digital photos in case the online storage company you choose decides to change businesses or go out of business. We believe that digital photos are a huge part of a person’s digital legacy and an important connection to the past.
What are you doing to protect your family’s digital photos?
- Tags:
- digital legacy · digital photos death · flickr death · online immortality · photo memories · picasa death · protecting digital photos on death
