For the last few thousand years, death has been a very simple matter. Upon death, your assets would be divvied up according to your will. Historically, assets were almost entirely physical — cars, houses, antique tables, jewellery, gold bullion, notebooks, photo albums — but today that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook, PayPal, WoW characters, source code, emails, Dropbox — when you die, your entire digital estate will disappear into the ether.

Many online services have policies in place that deal with death very neatly. Yahoo, Ebay, Blizzard, and LinkedIn, for example, will close and delete your account if proof of death is provided. PayPal will close your account, and if there are any funds in the account it will issue a check to the name of the account holder. At no point will your executor gain access to these accounts or any private messages therein.

Things get slightly messier with Twitter, which will provide a copy of all your public tweets and then close your account. When you report a death to Facebook, the account is “memorialized,” which prevents anyone from ever logging in to the account but allows friends to continue commenting. In both cases, again, no one gains access to any sensitive data or private messages.

Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, will furnish your heir with full access to your Gmail, Hotmail, and Google+ account upon your death. Your executor will need to provide a lot of details, including an official death certificate, and the review process can take a while, but ultimately your family will gain access to your complete email inbox and outbox.

In my case, assuming I live to 80 and Google doesn’t fold, this will mean that my children get access to more than 50 years of email — hundreds of thousands of email containing passwords, private communications, and a whole array of sensitive documents.

It gets worse

Services like Facebook and Hotmail are no-brainers — but what about other, smaller, more clandestine operations? If you committed an awesome piece of code to the Linux kernel on GitHub, how will you transfer ownership to your next of kin? What about the images you upload to Imgur? Or your comments on Reddit?

Just for a moment, think about all of the online services that you’ve signed up for, past and present. Forums, games, social networks, cloud storage, blogs, dating sites — when you die, all of that data will be lost. Your WoW characters, your Steam games, your university essays stored on some obscure cloud storage service — gone.

Digital legacy

And we’ve only discussed online services! What about the contents of your hard drive? Do they contain porn or other things that you’d rather your children didn’t see? Password protecting or encrypting your computer would seem wise in this case — but what if there are important files on your hard drive, such as bank details or your memoirs, that must be passed to your next of kin?

Are your documents/photos/videos organized in a sensible fashion? Have you told anyone where your backups are stored? Are there photos on your phone or tablet that need to be saved? Do you have any USB thumb drives or SD cards that need to be recovered?

In short, when you die, it will be such a pain in the ass for your family to track down and corral all of your assets that a lot of your digital legacy will probably be left to rot. Unless you make a digital will.

Next page: Dead man’s switch