What happens to all our tech after we're gone?
kevquirk.com
kevquirk.com
There are legal procedures for anything important (eg. financial accounts). You don't need the password, you just go through the legal frameworks that have been set up for years.
Almost everything else mentioned just doesn't matter that much. My personal site? Why would my wife want access? I guess maybe to put a "good bye" not or something but in the long run it doesn't matter.
My emails? Again, why would my family care? It'll rot away just like I will! (morbid, I know, but I liked the humour!)
The creative stuff I have made is either easily available on the web, or I intentionally don't want it shared, so whatever.
Social media posts and the like are unimportant.
Photos maybe? I have those backed up on an SSD, no password needed for that.
I used to care a lot about this, but over time I just realized how unimportant that stuff is once given a long enough time frame.
It's understandable that not everyone has people they talk to weekly where they don't know real names or locations outside of time zones. You say social media posts are unimportant, but I think that's only true if everyone in your social media circle know who you actually are.
I explained to my wife where the SSDs with backups are kept.
I regularly remind her that "the red plastic wallet" contains a printout of our financials. With a death certificate, she can chase up with the bank.
when the author wrote "our emails" my assumption was that the family all has <name>@customdomain - so that would absolutely include the spouse's (and maybe other family members') emails.
As a very IT-literate user I already struggle immensely keeping track of all my insurances, investment portal logins, bank account logins, etc. I shudder to think what would happen in the case of becoming cognitively incapacitated in some way.
Every time I return to this repo, I think it's awful, and I try to improve the recovery phase's usability.
That said, the author of the article notes that "[His wife is] not a techie and has absolutely no interest in becoming one." I'd advise him to separate the concerns of living the life of a techie, and handling the death of one. If you've ever been an executor of a loved one's estate, or worse, in charge of the estate of someone who died without a will but with significant assets, you know that dealing with someone's affairs after death is complicated or expensive (and often both). Asking someone to install some software and enter credentials is well within bounds.
Of course, if all your assets are in bitcoin then they are screwed.
And it's considerate to keep a list of accounts with credentials that your loved ones can consult during a difficult time. Especially with paperless communications these days, they might have no way of knowing an account even exists, and might learn only years later when escheat is approaching.
Not really since that wouldn't be legal. The estate is going to have to be processed through whichever local laws apply to it and that's going to take the time it takes whether you have passwords or not.
I 100% agree with listing accounts as part of a formal Will and Testament.
Only six states assess inheritance taxes, and only 12 assess estate taxes. Few (none?) assess those taxes against surviving spouses, children, or parents who inherit, and most are exempt if the inheritance or estate is under US$1 million.
I live in one of the 12 estate tax states, and their estate had no such tax obligations as a sole-surviving spouse. As a sole surviving spouse with no children, my state also granted me automatic and immediate default probate control over my partner's estate upon their death, and would have even if they didn't have a formal will.
Their will only specified a few of their financial accounts, and my access to their digital estate allowed me to manage the rest either directly or by simply knowing that they exist so I can submit the forms and certificates to close them out. (One such account had a $0 balance; it was purely administrative work, but still necessary.)
Having children, ex-spouses, or legal guardianship over a dependent all complicate these considerably, but in many cases it really is this simple.
Disclaimer: I wasn't paid to promote this, and the emergency access feature is only available on the premium (paid) plans. I still wholeheartedly recommend bitwarden as it has served me well over the years.
However, this can be a lengthy process and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Bills often go unpaid for a while. The conservator might not even be aware of some accounts, especially if the account holder signed up for electronic statement delivery.
* What to Do Before You Die: A Tech Checklist – https://archive.is/6vjqQ
* Cheat Sheet For If I'm Gone – https://thoughtscollected.tech/posts/for-when-im-gone/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31748553)
I manage all of the household finances and my partner doesn't involve herself for the most part. My simple solution: write an Apple Note and share it with her summarising everything I can think of.
I add to it every now and then when I think of something important. Hopefully it serves as a good starting point if the worst comes to the worst. It does make me think I should add a few notes about tech, though, such as 1Password and iCloud.
You need a name that will stick around for a long long time fundamentally on things like this.
This service: what guarantees or technical architecture mean it will stick around? Through upgrades, acquiring, economic ups and downs, death of owner? This website looks like a two bit shop.
It just highlights the transient nature of the web. Even things like facebook seem to have about a 20 year arc then things get acquired / renamed / subsumed.
The issue is the URL and DNS. There's no way to fix some link to a document or a service in stone for hundreds of years, even though we have the tech. Maybe government could provide that?
Corporations have the same issue addressing their files with links, especially in acquisitions / rebranding or re-re-re-branding.
And then of course there's hacking. Paper really does have its advantages sometimes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101105824/https://www.secur...
I like the UX of the other password managers more, but I need one I can share with my lawyer so that when I kick the bucket he can take care of things for me.
And I'm sure there are security implications. But, like giving having a neighbor hold on to a spare keys to your house, it's worth the trade off. You have to trust some people -- there are people who can help if you let them.
Anyway, until others have this functionality, it kinda means I'm stuck on LastPass. And that's OK... it's fine.
It's hard to write software for adults and also keep up with the latest and greatest design choices. (Or even design choices from the last 5-8 years, ha!)
But a note to all the other people making password managers... please jump on the "we're all going to die someday" bandwagon. (=
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
(2) https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/07/how-to-get-started-with-la...
Personal tech assets? I have no plan, but soon my kids will be old enough to be able to manage with proper instruction.
The easiest and more practical way is to have a couple of friends/relatives/spouse be aware of your wishes and leave detailed instructions on what to do.
The dead man’s switch is a very clever alternative way of doing this.
All I can think is you need a really well known way to create trust. Maybe starting with an open source solution.
2FA is kind of screwing this up screwing this up though, adding another hurdle.
For example, while it may make sense to bank with a big national firm that doesn't even have branches nearby, perhaps moving things to a credit union with local branches at some point is worthwhile, because at least then the next of kin can walk in and hash things out. After all, it's been done before.
Many accounts can just cease - no real need to post a "I'm dead now" to hacker news, for example.
By way of example I recall seeing a robbery video online I think in Chicago where some fella was walking to work early in the morning like 5am and a car passes him by, pulls a corner, waits for the victim to cross before them, comes out pulls out a gun and has the guy hand over his phone and I think verbalize the code or pass it over unlocked. I think the guy stole venmo or something off his accounts, something like that, and I forget if they were actually interested in the phone or just the information on the phone.
I bought two Apricorn drives with a keypad, and am saving dumps of my passwords there. Also working on a detailed set of instructions. Now need to find a good dead-man’s switch.
> we use X technology that is better than Y technology
it makes me think the entire point of the article was to advertise X technology to me.
- Update and lock or delete all of their social media, chat, and forums accounts, both personal/locked down, professional/public, and hobby-related. This was the primary way that many of their extended network found out about their death, including people not on social media who found out through their offline social connections.
- Access their contacts to organize memorials with all of the close contacts they had that I didn't — former coworkers, friends from places they lived before we met, extended family I didn't have contact info for, etc.
- Respond to text messages and social media posts from people who hand't yet heard and tried to reconnect with them in the months after their death.
- Update, identify, and closed any shared accounts, financial and otherwise, that didn't already automatically pass over to me. This was especially useful for their 401k, which blocked preferred forms of rollover disbursement into another account unless I had information I could get only via access to their web account.
- Transfer their website domains, some of which needed to persist for various reasons, to my domain management account, and forward their email addresses to my accounts.
- Deactivate their LinkedIn account, which required an inordinate amount of legal action — such as submitting legal proof of small estate probate, which even my state office told me not to get because it was unnecessary in our situation.
- Access utility accounts that were under their name and pay bills that were associated with my spouse's credit cards, pending the provider cutting over administration to me, which in some cases took weeks or required deleting the account with their credentials.
- Download their email, photos, documents, tax returns (they filed our taxes some years), recipes, and other digital products like licenses and Bandcamp music, from cloud services, online storefronts, and encrypted storage.
- Update our pets' microchip registrations, and vet and boarding contacts, to add me or make me the primary contact.
While my partner's illness had been terminal and treated for months, their decline and passing was much more sudden than either of us expected, occurring over the course of about three days. We were barely able to update their advance directive accordingly to the new diagnosis before they were physically and mentally incapable of doing so. If we hadn't handed off the broader pieces of their phone and BitWarden vault first, everything would've been much more difficult.
Since their passing, this access has been useful for prosaic things, like finding proof-of-purchase details for appliances they bought using their email account or phone number in order to get warranty service, or finding a book with library tags on the spine in their belongings and checking their account to see if they had checked it out so I could return it.
But there are lots of things I don't strictly need in my spouse's digital estate that I often find that I'm happy to have. I have dozens of conversations, voice messages, photos, and videos that we only shared via email early on in our relationship that weren't saved in other places, some of which existed only in their account. Our engagement photos were sent as archives in emails from the photographer to my partner, who hadn't forwarded that email to me because I was looking at them over their shoulder, and it included many that we hadn't added to our cloud storage. They owned a guitar that I hadn't known much about until I read through the emails of their acquiring it, and realized it was rarer and more valuable than I had anticipated by a considerable amount. They had most of the contact with the artisan who crafted our wedding rings, and I was able to use those contacts in my partner's email to reconnect with them and have them refashioned into a keepsake when I was ready to remove mine.
One day about a year and a half after they passed, while looking in one of their old phones for details about one of their business ventures they'd had before we met, I found a random folder with a solitary audio file in it. It was a clip of them singing a song a capella that they had apparently written in a car for about two minutes. I cried for the rest of the day that I found it, and since then I listen to it almost every week.