As you most of you know, I live a digital life. That doesn’t mean I have no existence outside the Internet or that I don’t have real life friends and loved ones. It simply means that almost all my transactions and non-face-to-face communications happen digitally. It also means that almost all of my personal information is stored online. As I’ve written before, even though we think we’re going to live forever, we probably won’t so it’s important that we arrange to have all that online data available to our survivors.
Than can be complicated because there are privacy concerns involved and many online services won’t release the data without prior authorization. Of course, it’s a hassle to arrange that authorization for all your accounts and you’ll probably forget some, even if you try. The better strategy is to provide your survivors with your log on credentials so that they can access whatever data they need.
A recent SANS Ouch! newsletter offers a few suggestions for handling the problem. The most useful, in my opinion is to keep all your logins in a Password Manager and to choose a person to entrust with access to the logins. That’s what I’ve done and I’ve made it an addendum to my will.
All this is not something that most of us want to think about but it is important that our families have the necessary data to continue their lives even if that means only having access to pictures of us for remembrance.