I watched an hour long video about a youngish technologist who died in auto accident. His wife lost control of their i-devices. Some of his encrypted devices that he maintained for clients were also equally inaccessible. The only way the wife regained control of her own digital and financial life was to tap technologist friends who called in favors with Google / Apple. Even they could not decrypt the miscellaneous client owned devices. Neither could the clients. [Edit: I searched for this video and unfortunately could not locate it.]
I put my parents on 1Password. Begged them actually. I quote "how about we just try it for like a week while I am here? if you don't like it, I won't ask you again." My Dad had a crazy so-called method that was supposedly simple to follow, but every time he tried to explain it to me as executor of his & my mom's estates, it was incomprehensible.
After 1 week, Dad was a convert and Mom had her first reliable access to the joint online bank accounts.
For myself, I have a technical hand over plan for somebody to follow to break the encryption on my devices. I also give an accounting of my data, what is where, both financial and sentimental. Most data can be immediately deleted, but some thing like my photography and music collections may be wanted by somebody in the family. The executor of my estate gets the financial records.
That sounds very unlikely. This isn't a new problem, and there are procesing in place which discover any and all financial account belonging to the deceased and transfer ownership to the estate's executor. I don't believe for a second that this woman couldn't get into some financial account belonging to her husband without inside help.
The issue wasn't getting into a financial account per se, rather getting into all the devices the husband controlled. She didn't know the passwords.
In the old days, estate executors would monitor physical mail to make sure they found all bank accounts. With many tech savvy people moving away from physical mail, the only notification about which accounts are out there are arriving by email to an account an executor does not have access to. How to know which accounts need to fall under the estate if you don't know the account exists?
Anyway, I will keep up the search for the video. I tweaked my personal technology plan a bit to deal with some of the issues that video raised. In addition to a physical list of key passwords, 2FA recovery keys, and encryption keys, I also included specific recovery scenarios like:
1) me dead, all laptops / phones / 2-factor fobs destroyed
2) me dead, phone missing, but still have laptop & fobs
3) me dead, laptop missing, but have phone & fobs
4) me dead, fobs missing but have laptop & phone
As a courtesy to clients, I also noted what client assets and data I controlled, where I kept the object, how to decrypt if necessary, and who to contact to arrange hand over.
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/04/how-to-prepare-to-join-the...
Where do you store all of this?
She actually did have an accident that caused memory loss and it was a huge problem for her.
Your memory is important, make sure you have a backup of the crucial bits :)
Especially valuable is the optionality. How would you feel if you could not have reviewed your father's files? What if you couldn't access critical financial accounts or didn't know they exist?
There are already procedures for an executor or heir to assume control of a deceased's financial accounts and assets, and part of that process is determining what accounts the deceased had.. You don't need to dig through Dad's Gmail for that.
Like the first poster said, anything actually important either already has procedures in place or will be figured out in the probate process or otherwise.
Trawling through browser histories and correspondence is often the only way to get a reliable picture of what's going on.
Last year's tax return will probably identify any significant investments, at least those that are producing income.
I, along with 95% of the world's population, do not live in a place where Equifax exists.
Tax returns capture some things. They also don't get filed for several years sometimes. They don't capture assets like cryptocurrency or off market shares.
Life is messy and death more so.
But you probably do live in a place with probate laws. This isn't a new problem, and there are processes to deal with it.
FWIW, if I really don't know that they exist, I would probably not feel anything about them ;P.
He was lucky all his grand father's note were on paper.
TimeHop kind of does this for social media, but it would be cool to open up my email accounts and iMessage. I think my loved ones would value opening up an app and saying "What was jbob doing on this day 2 years ago..."
Having in recent years lost more than one close relatives - no, I don't really need. I wouldn't do this even if I could.
If you want to be there for your loved ones be there today. Instead of coming up with a novel data vault scheme come up with a way to delight them tomorrow, when you are alive.
I love nerding about but if one is dealing with serious things like relationships, I would focus on pre-death interactions rather than post death mausoleums.
Listening to that while he's alive would be a waste of your irreplaceable shared time on Earth, right? It's just his job. While your Dad is alive you should go talk to him on subjects he cares about.
After he dies, though, if there happens to be an archive of your father joking around with, remonstrating, and otherwise being himself with the people who made up half of the social context for his waking life, year after year, that might be valuable to you.
It only has value in the right emotional context, of course, perhaps when you reach the age he was when the recordings were made. You can measure your daily self against the daily self your father created and inhabited.
An existential crisis might create a desire for that comparison, or perhaps you'll find yourself missing him and realize that family records don't show who he was in the world at large.
If your father is careless with that information you don't have that opportunity. If you are careless with your equivalent of that information your heirs won't have that opportunity.
When I die, I hope I am forgotten - because honestly, grief is shit, and the dead neither appreciate it, nor wanted it before they died. People can't be measured, and their lasting forms aren't them in any case - they are just text, video, photographs.
On the other hand, now, that's bleak.
I would view that human relationships are like strings that connect human beings. Grief of loss is the process of cutting those strings - one-by-one - and it hurts like hell. Because, if the relationship was an important one - I think it's supposed to. And after the grief has done it's job the living move on.
After the grief has done it's job, memories become bitter sweet. There are always complications, of course, and for example unresolved issues make it difficult to let go.
We begin to die the day we are born. It's only a matter of time, really. All of us are mortally ill of a condition called life. Every precious relationship must end in time.
There is a zen-story about this. A wise man was asked what was happiness? He answered, a man is born, a son is born, a grandson is born. Man dies, son dies, grandson dies. It sounds horrible the first time you hear it, but then you realize it nailed it completely - any other order would be worse, and having no children would be even sadder.
My mother has always said "Funerals are for the living, not the dead." I don't find the GPs attitude bleak at all. The people who grieve most heavily seem to be those with unfinished business with the deceased. If you leave behind no unfinished business, I think people can let it go fairly easily. They got what they needed while you were alive. That's a good deal.
I'd rather a decent amount of those survive me in some fashion. A few might, as they'll probably be included in console or flash game rom dump collections, but I wish more would. I also wish i completed more projects in my lifetime.
I've experienced the other side of this one - a lot of my family were amateur artists. Their work, on the whole, isn't that interesting. Their practice, on the other hand, is something they passed on, and I value it quite a lot. As a kid, I was always encouraged to make things, and to make new things rather than replicas, and to take making things seriously.
I still make a lot of stuff, and I really feel that people who don't are missing out - but I don't think I've made anything that I'd like my descendants to have - other than the practice of making things itself. I guess family, at its best, is about passing on traditions that allows you to live well in a frankly hard and troubling world. I mean, you can pass on more stuff than that - paintings, photos - but it usually ends up sitting in some attic. At least, that's what's happened to the creative output of about four generations of my family.
Truer words have never been spoken.
But when you're dead, there's no guarantee your descendants or next of kin will have any interest whatsoever in the minutia of your digital life.
Easy to fix - leave a note telling them you have huge wealth hidden away and the only way to find is it to solve the puzzles sprinkled throughout the minutia of your digital life.
For my own, some are online, but most are around the room, copied onto various storage devices (redundantly, and on devices that my wife knows about, and that other family members could easily find, if we were collectively hit by a bus).
In terms of ebooks and non-CD digital music, there's maybe a couple hundred dollars worth. Almost all of my digital video is on DVD/Blu-Ray. The photos would have more value, anyhow.
For software: Meh. My projects are mostly for my own entertainment. If someone wanted to fork them, it's not like they'd be fighting for control of a community, or something.
Although it's hard to look through personal files like that, it's even worse if you had the opportunity to, didn't do it, and the hard drive failed.
When my dad passed away, I looked through all his files (fortunately he had one password he used everywhere), but in the end there really wasn’t anything important.
There where a bunch of proposals, half finished projects, gigabytes of various data files, but following up on any of that stuff would just be a lot of work and require time that I don’t have.
I think that 99% of my data/code/digital footprint is only valuable because of me; when I pass away, most of my stuff will become worthless, and that’s okay.