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The dangers of your digital death
Harvey Jones, 11:26, Monday 5 December 2011
Don t make this mistake with your family s finances...
You only live twice, James Bond author Ian Fleming wrote. Well, I've just discovered that you die twice as well. The first is your paper death, and the second is your digital death.
Digital death is quite a new phenomenon, so most of us simply aren't prepared for it. It's about time we were. Because your digital death could be far more troublesome than the paper version.
You already know what to do about your good old-fashioned paper death. You write a will, setting out which of your loved ones will inherit the title deeds to your property and other assets.
Half of us still don't bother, which is ridiculous, given that you can write a will for a cheap price.
Even fewer of us are prepared for our digital death.
Sudden digital death syndrome
When we die, our body and soul aren't the only things that stop functioning, our online persona will also pop its clogs. If there is an afterlife, you won't find it on Facebook or Twitter.
This is a big problem, now that we live such active online lives. We have net-based bank and savings accounts, pensions and investment portfolios, and personal effects such as music, movies, photographs, blogs and social media accounts.
As banks, insurers and other financial organisations push towards paper-free statements to save money (and the planet, they claim), the trend will only grow.
In the online world, you won't leave a paper trail when you die, according to will-writing experts at law firm Hart Brown, which recently highlighted the problem. That makes it difficult for relatives to put the online pieces back together.
Online life after death
If you want your loved ones to know about your online activities after you die, you must assemble all the necessary data. You could call it your digital will.
If not, your digital effects will effectively be buried with you. Ancient tribal societies used to do this, so people could use their kit in the afterlife.
We don't have such high hopes of the afterlife, so please, bequeath your online life to the living.
Death is not the end
When people died in pre-digital days, they generally left plenty of paperwork, so relatives could find where the money was.
That's not so easy if their personal and financial data is buried on unnamed websites. Or if they have a massive digital music collection, but you are struggling to access it from their computer. Or don't know who is supposed to inherit it.
Passwords are another problem. Even if you have a vague idea of where they bought their pensions, ISAs and insurance, you will need their login details to access them.
If your loved one has uploaded photographs and videos to social media such as Facebook and YouTube, you will need login details for them as well.
And you will also have to decide whether you want to bury that highly personal blog.
People are starting to include this sort of information in their wills, Hart Brown says. The danger is that a will is a public document, which anybody can view for £6 by applying to the Probate Registry. You won't want your login passwords publicised this way.
Legacy locker
Several years ago, I made an attempt at tackling this problem. I printed out all the account numbers for my pensions, investments, insurance policies, and so on, and handed them to a relative for safekeeping, in case of my death.
Lazily, I have failed to update the information. I also forgot to include online passwords. I keep meaning to overhaul it, but haven't got round to it yet.
May be a better option is to store all the information in one of the growing numbers of online digital legacy lockers.
It is quite a problem, and one few of us have faced up to. Dying once is bad enough. Dying twice could be even worse.
Digital zombie attack!
When you die, you will leave a digital legacy behind you. You want to leave it to the right people.
You also want to prevent online fraudsters (or even greedy relatives) from robbing your digital grave, or even bringing your online ID back from the dead, forcing you to roam the next as a digital zombie.
Start thinking about it now. Otherwise your digital death could come back to haunt your family.
