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Comment by ChrisArchitect | Hacker News Reader

Sad. But nice that the dad was able to access a logged in session on the blog to make a post I guess. I ponder how so many of our digital lives (and thus lives in general) would be locked forever should something untimely happen as no one would have access to anything unless we left some sort of giant password log book or mechanism in place.

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If you are an Apple user, make sure you set up a Legacy Contact for your iCloud account. You can also optionally choose to allow access to your computer with your iCloud credentials, which will give your next of kin access to it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212360

Thanks for this reminder, it’s a feature I didn’t know about!

Same for Google accounts:

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

My wife and I used to keep all kinds of note about how to handle various accounts and communications if we died. Over time, we realized that what matters is our friends and family, not our online presence. My only note that is left is "Cancel my credit card - everything will get sorted out and deleted once bills aren't paid."

I'm not trying to diminish the importance of our online lives while we live. It is a big part of our lives. But after we are gone... different story.

To me, my online presence within certain communities is as much me as I am me with my friends and family in person and I care deeply about them. It's disturbing and worrying when someone that you talk to regularly suddenly stops coming online, and I generally spend most of my online time with people I care about.

Accounts like my shitposting twitter account and HN accounts - who cares. But I don't want to be another lost soul last seen online years ago after suddenly disappearing. I have too many people like that who I still think about.

I put a lot of though in this some time ago. So i made a python script, running on my server, that if something doesnt happen for at least 2 weeks automatic mails will go out to friends and family, each with some access to stuff they might be interested about and a final message.

I know this is a bit paranoic but its the best i can do. Also most of my passwords are on a kpdb file so with the master credentials someone could get all the access to everything (that would go to my VERY close family for example)

> if something doesnt happen for at least 2 weeks automatic mails will go out to friends and family, each with some access to stuff they might be interested about and a final message.

So that means if your server got hacked today, the hacker would have access to everything? Put differently, what I'm asking is: How exactly are you managing your credentials?

I was thinking the only way would be to write the master password and phone lock code in our will.

That's really the only mechanism we have to reliability transmit information post death yeah?

You can also print out your passwords and keep them with you end of life documents, depending on how often you change passwords if at all.

Or use a password manager, keep everything there and print out the „emergency kit“ that 1Password and probably others have.

Depends on the technical proficiency of whomever is going to inherit your accounts. I am familiar with folks where asking them to navigate a password manager would be not without challenges.

Indeed, it’s an interesting topic and always makes me a bit uneasy to think about it. Especially as a technical person where there’s credentials, keys, wallets all over the place.

I wish more companies would think about that and solve this in some way. 1Password could for example print out some instructions and have a support number to call listed directly there for someone who finds this document.

I have relatively technically incompetent family members, but my will instructs them to talk to any of 3 different technically competent friends that I trust (ideally more than 1 of them, all together in person with my estate providing funds for it) to guide them through shit like crypto private keys, password managers and encrypted archives that I could never imagine my very normal sister or mother dealing with. I check in with my friends every year to make sure that they're OK with the arrangement still, and the reason it's 3 is in case I'm involved in some kind of accident with 1 or more of them.

If by some freak accident all 4 of us die at once (at a bachelor party or something), I trust my heirs' competency to find someone who can guide them through it. I specify more than 1 because while I trust all the technical advisers, shit like gambling addiction can happen that I don't know about.

In return, I'm written in to help with similar circumstances for them.

The hard part is setting this up, but now it's just an annual email.

In a while, there will be three of you who have to come up with a replacement for the fourth... Or, your three friends for you.

Sorry, a bit morbid, I know. But something you‘ll have to think about nonetheless.

If you were worried about someone getting the password from your will before your death, you could use Shamir's secret sharing algorithm to spread a password among friends and relatives with instructions to not use it until after your death, so that some number of them have to agree to unlock it together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing

I haven't made one yet, but the idea of a [0]Death Book is one way to deal with that.

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=119346

BitWarden (and possibly other password managers) has a mechanism where you can specify people that can take over and view your credentials in the event of your untimely demise. Probably isn’t an immediate process or anything, but gives me a lot of peace of mind.

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