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Imagine you are planning the funeral music for a loved one who has died. You can\u2019t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual \u201cwrapped\u201d analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity.<\/p>\n
We tend to think about inheritance in physical terms: money, property, personal belongings. But the vast volume of digital stuff we accumulate in life and leave behind in death is now just as important \u2013 and this \u201cdigital legacy<\/a>\u201d is probably more meaningful.<\/p>\n Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving. They include now-familiar items such as social media and banking accounts, along with our stored photos, videos and messages. But they also encompass virtual currencies, behavioural tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.<\/p>\n This digital data is not only fundamental to our online identities in life, but to our inheritance in death. So how can we properly plan for what happens to it?<\/p>\n Digital legacy is commonly classified into two categories:\u00a0digital assets and digital presence<\/a>.<\/p>\n Digital assets include items with economic value. For example, domain names, financial accounts, monetised social media, online businesses, virtual currencies, digital goods, and personal digital IP. Access to these is spread across platforms, hidden behind passwords or restricted by privacy laws.<\/p>\n Digital presence includes content with no monetary value. However, it may have great personal significance. For example, our photos and videos, social media profiles, email or chat threads, and other content archived in cloud or platform services.<\/p>\n There is also data that might not seem like content. It may not even seem to belong to us. This includes analytics data such as health and wellness app tracking data. It also includes behavioural data such as location, search or viewing history collected from platforms such as Google, Netflix and Spotify.<\/p>\n This data reveals patterns in our preferences, passions, and daily life that can hold intimate meaning. For example, knowing the music a loved one listened to on the day they died.<\/p>\n Digital remains now also include scheduled\u00a0posthumous messages<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0AI-generated avatars<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of this raises both practical and ethical questions about identity, privacy, and corporate power over our digital afterlives. Who has the right to access, delete, or transform this data?<\/p>\n Just as we prepare wills for physical possessions, we need to plan for our digital remains. Without clear instructions, important digital data may be lost and inaccessible to our loved ones.<\/p>\n In 2017, I helped develop key recommendations for\u00a0planning your digital legacy<\/a>. These include:<\/p>\n These steps may sound uncontroversial. But digital wills remain uncommon. And without them, managing someone\u2019s digital legacy can be fraught with legal and technical barriers.<\/p>\n Platform terms of service and privacy rules often prevent access by anyone other than the account holder. They can also require official documentation such as a death certificate before granting limited access to download or close an account.<\/p>\n In such instances, gaining access will probably only be possible through imperfect workarounds, such as searching online for traces of someone\u2019s digital life, attempting to use account recovery tools, or scouring personal documents for login information.<\/p>\nA window into our lives<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Planning for your digital remains<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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What if your loved one left no plan?<\/strong><\/h4>\n