Who will Inherit your Online Data?

At 30, you may or may not hold an investment portfolio, house in the Hamptons or own a private island. However, you would certainly have an email account(or multiple ones a la Gen Petraeus), a Facebook page, Social apps, Paypal & Amazon accounts, music collections on itunes, points accumulated on online gaming sites and so on.

What will happen to the emails, online social pages and other personal information when someone dies?

Digital assets are certainly not like financial or personal assets. Online identity, to some is an alter ego and to many others it is the only life that they live. How many of us share our email inbox with even a spouse? These are thoughts that popped into my mind and I wondered what I would want to do with mine and how it could be passed on as a legacy.

Let's start by going over the status quo. There are currently five states in the US that have enacted estate laws to include digital assets – Connecticut, Rhode Island, Idaho, Oklahoma, Indiana and many others are in the process of doing this. Earlier this year, a family in Wisconsin sued Facebook and Google to have their son's online accounts released after his untimely death. While Google and Facebook have no qualms collecting our personal information to sell ads, they do draw a line at passing them on to the deceased's family.

While we could depend on future legislation to take care of this for us, planning how to leave a digital legacy and who to pass it on to is as important as estate planning and in fact, the decisions have to be handled much earlier in our life than the latter. So, how do we make sure our online identity is not mismanaged and passed on without too many hassles? These are some of the alternatives that come to mind:

1. Along with the privacy policy that we agree to while signing up for an account, there could be additional questions about what is to be done with the account in the event of a mishap.

2. Our emails could get classified as we receive them as 'public' or 'protected'. So one set of emails are available for access in the future. Same with the files on cloud storage.

3. The most practical alternative as I see it, would be to store all the details in a separate app indicating the digital assets that need to be passed on and several applications have come up to help us do this. But storing the details is just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is multi-layered as we need to make multiple decisions about whether the executor is allowed to access the personal messages or just the photos and public profile on Facebook/Linkedin. How to handle the business information on cloud storage? There maybe more than one device that is password protected and decisions need to be made to make sure personal information is not misused while key data are appropriately transferred.

What do you think? Leaving aside the legislature, how would you want to make sure your digital assets are protected, while the most important ones are still passed on?