Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it

I've thought some about what will happen to my website and newsletter after I’m gone. It is a much more complicated matter than it seems and it is certainly not just a technical one. Having a digital will is likely a needed thing already. I like the categorical breakdown here.

Digital legacy is commonly classified into two categories: digital assets and digital presence.

Digital assets include items with economic value. For example, domain names, financial accounts, monetised social media, online businesses, virtual currencies, digital goods, and personal digital IP. Access to these is spread across platforms, hidden behind passwords or restricted by privacy laws.

Digital presence includes content with no monetary value. However, it may have great personal significance. For example, our photos and videos, social media profiles, email or chat threads, and other content archived in cloud or platform services.

I've thought a good amount about those assets but I haven't considered as much those presence items.

Digital remains now also include scheduled posthumous messages or AI-generated avatars.

Again expanding the realm of what we want to consider. Having messages that are scheduled to send in the future, after one's death, may not be uncommon but it also isn't that difficult and there are services that will do this for you now. By the way, how sad would it be if those messages went into spam folders and were never read.

A couple of years ago Apple introduced Legacy Contacts for your Apple account that is a solution in this space. I’m not sure what other companies are doing here but it is something that should be part of accounts and products.

This is an area that I find blockchain technologies compelling since the assets are controlled by wallets and if I transfer that wallet to another person there is guaranteed access and control.

Everything you would do to better manage your security and privacy helps you here. The number one recommendation is to use a password manager. And if you do that, you automatically have a database of all your logins. As long as you manage to get your "digital executor" those credentials you're good. And nearly all of those solutions have an option to print out a combination of codes and passwords that could be stored and given to someone to get access.

So, yeah, make sure you are using a password manager.