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LastPass Adds Feature to Unlock Your Vault When You Die

January 6, 2016

More and more of our data is held in digital form. One of the popular CLE sessions we give is called "When you die, will your digital assets go to hell?" In other words, what is going to happen to all of your digital data if you die or are incapacitated? It is a question many attorneys are trying to address in clients' wills. Do you keep all of your passwords in a safe deposit box? Will it be up to date? Do the Terms of Service allow logging into an account if you are not the actual account holder?

The good news is that more and more application and cloud providers are aware of the problem and designing methods to deal with digital assets upon death. LastPass is one of the latest to provide a method to allow access to your encrypted password vault to people you trust. You define e-mail address(es) for those you trust and a timeout period. Should something happen to you, the person identified can send a request to access your LastPass vault. LastPass then contacts the owner to make sure everything is okay and starts the timer. If the owner of the vault doesn't respond to LastPass within the timeout period, the requester is given access. It is an optional feature that must be enabled, but it sounds like a good idea to me.

E-mail: Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
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