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Don’t Forget to Name Your ‘Digital Executor’

August 30, 2022

Let’s face it. Digital information is ever present and isn’t going away. Pretty much everything we touch has some element of digital data associated with it. Our cars are computers that ride on four wheels. Our wrist “jewelry” captures heartbeats, hand gestures and the altitude of our bodies. Smartphones know all the intimate details of our lives. Social media invades our privacy at every turn. Bottom line, there’s a boatload of electronic data associated with our lives. Just like our physical assets, we should provision for dealing with our digital assets later in life, which many of us haven’t thought about. Lifehacker has a post to help you deal with the digital information of our lives. As the post states, your digital estate can include such things as:

• Your usernames, passwords, and accounts.
• Personal files like photos, videos, emails/text messages, Excel and Word documents, etc.
• Purchased digital goods like your online movie collection, your digital gaming libraries (and any items purchased for those games), and your music collection.
• All data saved on your phone, computer, hard drives, and other devices, as well as data saved to your cloud storage.
• Cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

The terms of service will govern what you can and can’t do with the information captured/stored. Some services have specifically established credentials or a process for accessing your information. Even if there isn’t a way to define “secondary” access, you should document your credentials for your digital executor. A password manager is a great way to keep everything in one place. Just make sure you have a secure way to relay your master password to your executor.

Email:   Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
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