What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die?

posted by Robert E. Calem on June 29, 2010
 

You’ve spent years cultivating an online persona and archive of your life: a Facebook account detailing your daily life and personal history; an e-mail account brimming with personal and business communications; a Flickr album and, perhaps, accounts at some sites you would rather your family didn’t know about.

Because it’s all online, stored in digital bits that theoretically last forever, you can feel secure that it will all be there when you wake up in the morning.

But what happens to all this stuff the morning you don’t wake up––after your death?

Will you be able to leave your digital persona in the hands of heirs, like a shoebox full of old family photos? Will all your accounts simply evaporate over time? Can you hide those embarrassing photos, emails and accounts from family and friends you don’t want ever to see them, maintaining your privacy for eternity?

These are questions now being addressed by a growing industry of dedicated “digital estate” websites and planners, including some who came together in March at the industry’s first convention––dubbed Digital Death Day.

Read on for answers.

Going without a plan is a bad idea

“In the past we had heirlooms that were physical objects, like photo albums, and these things could be found in your home after you passed away. However, in the digital world these things might be in a service like Flickr,” making them harder to discover and access. So, “planning for their afterlife” is a critical choice, says Evan Carroll, who together with co-author John Romano has penned “Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy?,” a book slated to be published by Peachpit Press next November. (The two also blog about digital afterlives and dive deep into the topic at their website, thedigitalbeyond.)

“Some of the things that are most valuable to people are [those] they put on the Web without thinking about it,” such as photos of children shot candidly with a cellphone, Romano adds. “If you do have an attachment to these things and think that your children or spouse would, then you should go ahead and actively work to preserve them. To not make a choice, and to not do anything, is making a choice to let whatever happens happen.”

Overall nationwide, the category of digital assets is ill-defined or completely avoided in estate law, which is set by individual states, notes Nathan Dosch, an attorney at the law firm of Neider & Boucher in Madison, WI, who specializes in estate planning for digital property and digital assets. “Our lawmakers certainly aren’t on the forefront of technical advances and the things we worry about.” As a result, without a plan, what may happen to any of your digital assets will largely depend on both the nature of the asset and where it is kept online, Dosch says.

A website domain name (URL) registered to you is a true asset that is transferable and passes with the residue of an estate, and your blog content firmly belongs to you under copyright law.

On the other hand, an online account with a website such as Facebook or YouTube or Flickr is not a true asset in a property sense; all you have is a license to use the site, and often transferability upon death is prohibited by the site’s “terms of service,” which is a binding contract, he explains. While by law you own all the photos and other content you generate, and the site has a non-exclusive license to use it, if your heirs can’t access your account, they can’t access your property.

Of particular importance is access to e-mail accounts. While in the past heirs discovered assets like bank accounts by finding statements in the mail, today many clues to such assets arrive via e-mail instead and, without such access, this difference could lead to assets being overlooked and therefore not properly listed in a probate scenario, he adds.

Dosch’s advice: Instruct your heirs to step into your shoes, becoming you for all intents and purposes, and leave them a list of all your account user names and passwords to enable them doing this. This transfer may technically violate the website’s terms of service, he says, but he argues that legally it is the equivalent of granting “power of attorney” and therefore is defensible. “We’re in uncharted territory for sure. It’s ripe for a battle at some point.”

CONTINUE READING AT: http://www.techlicious.com/how-to/what-happens-to-your-online-accounts-when-you-die/