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.

There is a darker side to the personalization of the Internet. One that, rightly, has many people worried about a privacy that they once took for granted. This conundrum comes from the Internet’s struggle to find balance between its users competing desires for both privacy and individual identity.

On one side of the argument you have people like Mark Zuckerberg, who believe that the more connected and transparent the world is the happier its inhabitants will be–that is, it’s fun to see what your friends are doing across the digital landscape; what they read, what they buy, who they talk to, ect,. And at the end of the day, no one’s forcing you to share anything, right? Plus, why wouldn’t you want people to know what you’re doing unless you have something to hide, huh?

This can start to sound very similar to the old justification for secret or moral police. Professions that, interestingly enough, don’t always attract the most moral people. When we give people so much power over the information, which in many ways helps to define us, it gives way to the big brother question; who watches the watchers? Also, though no ones forcing you to share your information, the history of Microsoft, Facebook and others show that companies can be a bit less than transparent in ways in which they use your data.

In spite of this, it has in the past, and in the future will continue, to be about money. The reason companies like Facebook are able to make money is because the information they have on their users is gold to advertisers. Those targeted ads–for everything from Security degrees from barely accredited schools to the best abs of your life to great ways to meet Christian girls- they are the price we pay for a free service. So while we all may complain, at the end of the day we would rather endure buxom anime elves telling us to join the best game of the year than paying a monthly membership fee.

So, while free services and ads may inextricably linked for the near future, that does not mean that your privacy is at immediate risk. Just like its our choice to put information about ourselves on the Web, it is also our choice what sites we use to do so. If it turns out Facebook can’t meet its member’s privacy needs there are literally dozens of other sites waiting to fill the vacuum. At least to some degree, the power is in the hands of the people.

The amount of data we store in the many niches of digital ecosystem continues to swell in both volume and value. It is for this reason that services like Entrustet’s Account Guardian are becoming more and more of a necessity to protect your online legacy and ensure it gets to who you want it to.  And, unlike social media, Account Guardian is both free and we keep your information completely private.

It can be hard to understand how two parties, both of whom claim to be working towards the same goal, can have such fundamentally different views on how to get there. The reason is that there is a foundational difference in each party’s view of what enables an individual to be successful. This conflict of visions is epitomized in the debate over estate tax.

The reverberations of this argument could also very well have far reaching consequences in an area of inheritance that has hitherto been completely tax-free: digital assets.

To start with lets get some facts about federal estate tax down. Firstly, the estate tax is currently at 35% of any inheritance over $5 million, which is not willed to a federally recognized spouse or charity, this is the lowest it has been since 1931 (not including 2010 when there was no federal estate tax). Second, these current rates mean that the estate tax only applies to 0.14% of inheritances in the US, but would still generate around $11.2 billion in revenue. With such a small percentage of Americans subject to this tax you may ask, ‘why such a big fuss?’ Again, the principle reason is ideological. Who has the right to the money that you made?

Democrats believe that true capitalism is only possible through equality, and that unregulated free markets cannot provide this equality. The estate tax, they believe, is a good way of making sure that wealth does not become distributed to just a few families and that each generation proves itself, rather than simply living off inheritance. They claim that, as the inheritor did nothing to earn the money, she does not deserve it. In the words of Winston Churchill the estate tax, “provides a certain corrective against the development of a rich and idle class.” Liberals also argue that no man is an island. That it is the government and society that created the environment within which the entrepreneur could succeed, and as such an inheritance tax is completely justified.

The death tax, as Republicans call it, is seen as an affront to capitalism for several reasons. For one, it disincentivizes hard work and entrepreneurism. A study done by the conservative lobby group the US Tax Foundation, in 1994, found that the 55% estate tax level, which existed at that time, had the same effect as doubling an entrepreneur’s top effective marginal income tax rate. Many conservatives would agree with liberals that an inheritor did nothing to earn that money. However, they would say, neither did the government. The money belongs to the person who earned it and as such they can do whatever they damn well please with it, including leaving it to an heir. A tax of this nature is seen as punishing wealth gained by legal means and implicitly declaring that socialism/collectivism is superior to capitalism. Finally, Republicans cite that estate taxes are so difficult to regulate that most of the money gained from them just goes toward the cost of policing, so there is not much benefit for the government to begin with.

So will there still be an estate tax in the future and will it be expanded to include digital assets? Yes and yes. Though the estate tax has significantly fluctuated in recent years, it brings in far too much money to be abolished, especially in times like these. Not only that, but taxing 0.14% of a population who just got a multi-million dollar inheritance isn’t likely anger the majority of Americans, many of whom are struggling to pay the bills.

As far as digital assets there is simply too much value in them the government to ignore them forever. However, as with many technologies, laws are struggling to keep pace with the amorphous evolution of the Internet. Though the definition and implementation of such a tax will be quite difficult, and the first attempts will almost certainly be inadequate, efforts towards it are no doubt already underway.

Well that’s the idea behind Bitcoins, a “decentralized internet commodity” that can be purchased with ‘real’ money and used to buy physical products. They are the brainchild of Satoshi Nakamoto (probably a pseudonym) who in 2009, in an effort to circumvent central banks and the dangers he saw in them, created a peer-to-peer network, much like bittorrent, through which his digital currency could be traded. Rather then having someone like Ben Bernanke inject hundreds of billions of dollars into an economy through policies like quantitative easing, a set and predicable number of Bitcoins (currently 300 an hour) are created. These coins are then distributed to community members who sacrifice some of their computer’s processing power to host the system. Once the Bitcoins are deposited in your ‘wallet’, either on your personal computer or a third party’s servers, you can transfer them to buy things or exchange them for cash based on market rates.

Other than the ‘cool’ factor that Bitcoins certainly do possess, there are several other reasons that their advocates believe they are superior to tradition currency. Probably the single biggest reason, and the one that gets economists all hot and bothered, is that Bitcoins are based around the same principles as natural resources, such as gold. There is a finite amount and, over time, the new amount of that resource entering the market will go down. Remember those 300 coins produced every hour today? Well that will drop by half every four years until, in around 2030, no more new Bitcoins will be produced. It even one-ups gold in that there is no chance of some prospector stumbling on a huge deposit of Bitcoins and driving down prices. This, at least in theory, should make it more stable.

Unlike paper money there is no unique serial number or marking for each Bitcoin. Instead, the system relies on a transaction record that records the amount of each transaction per block and references that against the other blocks to ensure that no counterfeit coins were created. In doing this Nakamoto effectively circumvents the need for a central database, like the Federal Reserve, to keep track of the serial numbers of all the coins.  The cool part about this is that it also means that the bigger the system gets, and the more blocks that are added, the harder it is for someone to counterfeit the coins. This is because in order to fool the system you would have to control over half the computers on it; not an easy or inexpensive thing in a peer-to-peer network of 10,000+ computer savvy people. The other nice aspect of the transaction record is that it means you don’t have to be connected to the system to receive payment.

So with such great attributes are we all going to be using Bitcoins instead of dollars in a few years? No, and here why.

For one governments don’t like them. Senators note that it could easily be used to launder money and that, because this is no central authority, there is no insurance. FDIC is not terribly likely expand to cover Bitcoins anytime soon.

Secondly, Bitcoins have already shown the most worrying feature of using a relatively small, restricted quantity as a monetary unit: hyper-deflation. Since they first became tradable for U.S dollars in April of last year they have seen a staggering 9,667-fold increase in value. Going from being worth three one hundredths of a dollar to $29 per Bitcoin. This astronomic rise in value has also been punctuated by precipitous drops throughout that same period, a trait that doesn’t tend to engender a great deal of confidence in a currency’s long-term stability.

This criticism, however, can be overblown. Bitcoins are an experiment that came into existence barely two years ago and are being used by relatively few people. Though their short history has been a bit of a roller coaster, comparing Bitcoins to world currencies backed by governments that control real territories and economies, at this point, isn’t quite fair either.

Another issue stems from the fact that Bitcoins are stored in a ‘wallet’ on your computer. Because of this, if your computer gets stolen or hacked you could lose your Bitcoins.

Though these shortcomings are understandable they are also the reason that hordes of people aren’t rushing to switch their hard earned savings into these electronic coins. When it comes to keeping your money safe its understandable to stick with the tried and true method. Though our current financial system is certainly not without its faults, people like the idea that there is a government looking after their cash more than they like to hope that some computer wiz is double-checking each line of open-source code in the next Bitcoin update. That’s why, at least for the time being, the average Joe is going to keep with the old saying; its better to stick with the devil you know than the one you don’t.

From our side of the court, we have yet see people protecting their Bitcoins through Entrustet. However, with their growing popularity and value it’s only a matter of time before people start thinking of how to pass them on.

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

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!

Would you buy a pair of shoes if you knew that they had been made in a sweatshop where third-world preteens slaved away for 16+ hours a day? Most people would say no. That’s why there is such a hubbub when it comes out that company has been keeping its workers in conditions that we in the west think are unethical. Think GAP and Firestone in 2007. When we find out something about a company we don’t like, we stop buying from them. The feedback loop of consumers, activists and companies has created something of a self-policing environment wherein it pays for companies to be ethical. But is that true of digital products?

It came out a few days ago that Chinese prison bosses have been forcing convicts to farm gold in World of Warcraft. Doesn’t sound that bad until you find out that these 12-hour “mining” shifts followed on the heels of a full day manual labor, and that if you didn’t meet your gold quota you were beaten with pipes.

The gold that these prisoners farmed was then sold online, mostly to American and European gamers. This little mix of entrepreneurism and slavery earned the prison bosses between $800 and $900 a day (the prisoners naturally never saw any of it). Not bad in a country where you can get a full meal for $1.

Gold mining in China is nothing new. Roughly 80% of the World of Warcraft gold for sale online comes from the Middle Kingdom. Many of you will have heard about the “workshops,” where anyone from children to the elderly (though its usually teens) are paid to farm gold for a few dollars a day. While the condition may not be ideal, they aren’t different from most Chinese factories and don’t hold a candle to the prisons described by the former inmate.

Nor is sanctioned mistreatment of convicts anything new. Depending on your source a prison/uranium mine in China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang is the world’s deadliest penitentiary. It is a compound where life expectancy is measured in weeks due to extremely harsh work conditions and exposure to radiation.  Along with this, the Chinese government’s systematic reeducation and torture of political dissents has also been widely reported.

What makes this report unique and interesting is not only that this is the first time the two have been combined but also because of the ethical questions it raises for gamers. Is saving a bit of time on leveling up your character worth knowing you could be directly supporting slavery? “Well,” you might say, “these are prisoners, I don’t mind helping punish murders and rapists.” The obvious counter arguments of the ethical treatment of prisoners and the legitimacy of the Chinese justice system aside, this report could very well be just the tip of the iceberg. Who is to say that there are not rundown office buildings full of Mandarin children staring listlessly at computer screens, slaving away to get your gold? The point is that, unlike most physical products, there is no way to know for sure where these products are coming from.

On the extreme end, some gamers may say, “Well, I guess since there is no way for me to be sure I’ll just have to bite the bullet and earn my own gold.” But believing that would be idealistic and naïve. Most consumers don’t care enough to look into the products they buy until it becomes fashionable or someone makes it easy for them- gamers are no different. What could, should, and on a small level has already started to happen, is an effort to make the supply chain of digital products more transparent. Several WoW gold selling website have already come out to assure the public they have safeguards to protect against sellers like the aforementioned prison bosses. This is great and probably true but the best way to be sure would be to have an outside, independent body to check these claims, much like the independent audits almost every NGO goes through to assure their supporters of their legitimacy. This, just like WoW gold farming, will not happen until gamers take it upon themselves to demonstrate there is a demand for it. The ball is in our court.

The Chinese prisoners report brings up an interesting ethical quandary for WoW players, but also more broadly for anyone who purchases digital products. How is that product produced? Is it done ethically or by an unpaid prisoner with the threat of torture as his only incentive? My guess is that the demand for such assurance will eventually exist, the only question is whether traditional methods, such as independent audits, will prevail or something newer and better will emerge. Either way it will be interesting to see what happens.

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.

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?

We started doing these searches after we heard from many attorneys and survivors of the recently deceased that they were unable to locate or access the online accounts of a recently deceased individual.  They knew that the person who had passed away had online accounts, but did not know their user names or exactly what sites on which they were members.

Our virtual property searches not only find online accounts, but they provide step by step instructions on how to access, transfer and delete each virtual asset that we find.  For more information, check out our digital property search section of our website or request a sample report from info@entrustet.com.