Sunday, April 17, 2016

What Happens to My Digital Assets When I Die?

A digital asset may be a social media account, email account, on-line financial account, or digital photos. It can be anything that is created and stored in binary format and includes your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler, yahoo and  Gmail accounts, on-line cloud storage and more.

But, what happens to your digital assets when you die?  Who has control over these accounts? Who has the authority to ask for account deletion or preservation?

These questions, and others, are being hotly debated across the United States.  It is not just your privacy that is at issue, it’s also the privacy rights of others. For example, what about email dialogues between you and your significant other, spouse, or sibling?  

The KTVU report “Bill which aims to preserve on-line privacy” that aired on September 15, 2015 discusses the bill AB 691 when it was first introduced in California and which has not yet been passed into law.

In the interim, PEW Research details what you can do as part of your estate plans to address how to control your digital assets after your death. What happens to your digital life after death?

Because your legal rights to your digital assets are not yet “set in stone,” you may want to discuss this issue with your estate attorney or, minimally, to keep a list of your accounts and user names in a safe place such as your safe deposit box and available to your executor or fiduciary after death.

It will be interesting to see how the rights to one's digital assets plays out in the legal landscape. 

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