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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I don't particularly like the idea of my relatives sneaking into my files when I am dead. I destroyed all my father's files when he passed to respect his privacy.

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The problem with this is relatives may need to when it comes to dealing with wills and assets later. Naive legal statements like "I leave my car to Bob" become rather difficult when the car is tied into cloud accounts, locked EV chargers and weird subscription services. It becomes a whole digital forensics operation.

I personally have no problem with them going through my stuff. Not the "I have nothing to hide" defence. I just don't give a crap.

With respect to my personal situation, my father took thousands of photos of me, my children etc back as far as 2002. Sent me a selection low res jpegs of them by email. I was thrilled when I got the original RAWs from his NAS in the end. There was so much stuff in there I had forgotten that he hadn't sent.

Consider using a local backup solution to store your and your family's digital assets. This way, you can easily access and share them later. You can start with a free tool like Telemetry Blocklist to ensure your backup solution isn't sending any data to the cloud. If you need more advanced features, Backup Agent can help you encrypt and back up your local AI stack, including photos and other files.

Adding more technology to the problem isn't a good solution. It multiplies the problems.

I have a set of files in my true offline backup that my family (or other executor) will have access to should I pass. This is things like bank details and such, credentials for online accounts & other services so they can close them (and perhaps archive things like photos if they don't already have copies), so that they can close off my affairs with minimal faf.

Everything else will be inaccessible if I'm not around. This also means less faf for them: all the info they need to care about is in that package, they don't need to look at the huge disorganised pile of everything else to find the information that they might need.

Yes. My instructions are basically to destroy or erase everything and don't let any device with storage fall into unknown hands. Not that there is anything there and everything is routinely encrypted, but there is still a chance that some of the data could be used for identity theft or other harm to someone else. None of the devices or data is that valuable.

I'd say if you want someone to have data or access, you should work that out in time.

But delete everything is good advice. I'd emphasize also keeping some list of services that you may have accounts or logins in and delete and close and erase every single one that you're not using.

everyone should do this, but it is difficult. imo, it is better to talk with your parents beforehand (if possible) to understand what they want to share with you and what they do not.

99% of people don't know or don't care or don't decide to deal with it until they are past being able to deal with it. It's difficult.

I've seen tears shed because a wife couldn't get into her dead husband's iPhone to get the photos off from their final holiday together.

Technology is HORRIBLE in this space socially speaking.

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