Google yourself and you never know what you may find. According to My Life I live where I haven’t lived for two years, worked as a manager for a client for which I only provided brief representation and spent 2012 in Chowchilla, California, a city located halfway between Modesto and Fresno which I never visited. Access my bank account website and see all my statements for the past year and a half, access my credit card website and see all my statements for the past year, access my Gmail account and see all of my e-mail for the past few years. If I used Facebook extensively, my photo albums and my timeline would be visible as well as the names of all of my “friends.” My Netflix account lists all of my movie tastes. These third parties hold records of all of my communications, restaurants I’ve eaten at, flights I have taken, movies I have watched, roads I have traveled, as I paid for gas on my credit cards, as well as my social and professional contacts as found in my e-mail address book.
Everyone leaves a digital trail. An article in this month’s Washington Lawyer brings up an interesting issue. When you die with your digital history, what happens to it? Your remains may sit in an urn on the mantelpiece but your digital remains remain alive and well in numerous data centers and, unless you tell your survivors what your passwords and user names are, or your survivors are very good computer hackers, that digital trail remains and may contain important information for your survivors. For example, that “friends” list may want to know about your death or attend your funeral. And you won’t be around to insert that final entry on your Facebook page or update your status to “Deceased.”
What to do…let the executor of your will or a trusted friend or relative with some technical expertise know your user names and passwords. If you have a joint bank account your partner should know how to access it; same with any other on-line banking or investment sites that you regularly access. Assuming that you have nothing to hide and you regularly use Facebook, that social network may be an ideal way for your surviving partner to notify people of your untimely end and Facebook provides means to memorialize the deceased. If you have a Twitter account with a lot of followers 140 characters should be enough to do the same. Note if you have something to hide or your e-mail account includes privileged communications, e.g., attorney-client communications you may wish to consider disclosing that information to counsel. If the deceased individual’s digital trail contains trade secret information, such as that of her employer, that deceased individual’s employer is the owner of that information and disclosure to a third-party could subject the deceased’s estate to legal liability.
Also to consider are any assets that you have in digital form such as photographs, artwork, sound recordings, writings, family histories, or collections of objects that may be on your web page or hard drive or elsewhere on the cloud that may have significant monetary value in themselves. Not only might your survivor want to note your passing on Facebook but that that may be a good time for your personal blog or website to cease its existence as well. And those photographs, artwork, sound recordings, writings, family histories and collections of objects that may be on your web page or hard drive or elsewhere on the cloud may have another valuable place, at your funeral so family and friends may memorialize you. As for your iTunes or e-books, note that these are merely licensed by you and upon your death would revert back to Apple or Amazon, if that is the case.
Rules to consider here; (1) don’t put your password and user name information in your will as wills are public documents; (2) you probably want to limit access to that information until after your death, unless you are already sharing that information with a trusted individual such as your partner or employer (in the latter case if that information contains proprietary business information); (3) if you live in Connecticut, Indiana or Rhode island, a death certificate and proof of your appointment by an executor to see the on-line accounts of a deceased will give you access to those accounts and in Idaho, an executor or a personal representative has the right to control the deceased’s social media, text messaging and e-mail accounts; and (4) as noted above, you probably want to let someone know, e.g., your executor, partner, business partner or business successor about your digital trail and how to access it upon your demise as well as leave them instructions as to what to do with it. Otherwise, you may find yourself in Chowchilla for all eternity.
