ShareThisKarin Prangley, an estate-planning attorney in Chicago, became an expert on post-mortem online assets after experiencing firsthand such complications.
When her father-in-law had a stroke in 2008, his building-supplies business lost between $10,000 and $15,000 because packages continued to arrive at his warehouse and no one had any idea where they were supposed to go. His address book and e-mails were all locked behind password-protected accounts and, eventually, Prangley and other relatives had no choice but to reconstruct her father-in-law's list of contacts on their own.
As more of our daily activities have migrated into the online realm, the digital cloud has not only become an often-indispensable work tool, but also an archive for the story of our lives. Piece together e-mails, photographs and other online notes and musings shared through social networking and you'd have quite a comprehensive picture of who a person was.
So what happens to our digital identity when we die? Odds are it will remain trapped in the Internet without someone investing quite some time and effort.
"When Generation Xers and Yers begin dying many years from now, we're going to have a digital crisis and there's going to be a lot of orphan accounts, even financial ones, with real value," Prangley said.
Many other estate-planning attorneys -- and a handful of entrepreneurs -- believe the issue will become more prominent as the first generations to grow up with the Internet get older. Several online services are already catering to users interested in digital life after death.
Web sites like MyLastEmail.com offer to store e-mail messages and send them out after clients pass away. Others like BCelebrated.com allow users to write their own autobiographical memorial.
San Francisco's Legacy Locker works as the digital safe deposit box, allowing users to store their passwords and transfer them to relatives when they die.
Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Toeman said the idea for Legacy Locker came from personal experience. His 94-year-old grandmother, an avid e-mailer with friends all over the globe, died in 2007 and left Toeman and his family with no way of notifying others of her death.
Toeman said the service is designed for people with active online lives who want to make sure their accounts are managed according to their wishes after death.
Legacy Locker promises online-banking-like security with a hundred layers of encryption while the person lives, and requires a client's death to be confirmed before turning over any passwords to relatives. Administrators say not even they can see their clients' information.
Another Web site, My WebWill, which is set to go online in Sweden and the United States in early March, offers to carry out a person's last digital wishes. Besides forwarding passwords to relatives, My WebWill will deactivate accounts, make final updates on Facebook, send last tweets on Twitter or even ensure a client's "World of Warcraft" character finds a new home.
Few people plan what to do with their digital assets after they die, but My WebWill co-founder Lisa Granberg believes it won't be long before the issue becomes a widespread problem and causes headaches to thousands of relatives locked out of sentimentally valuable information.
"People tend to talk about their online and offline lives, but it's becoming more of a single life, and where there's life there's also death," Granberg said.
Large online companies usually offer people ways to manage the accounts of loved ones who have passed away, but the process is rarely a simple one.
In a notable 2005 case, for instance, the father of a Marine who was killed by a roadside bomb in Fallujah had to obtain a court order to gain access to his son's Yahoo Mail account.
Yahoo, which also runs the popular photo-management service Flickr, is known for having one of the strictest privacy policies. In the company's terms of service, users agree that their accounts will be "non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death."
However, Yahoo will agree to shut down an account if relatives submit a copy of a death certificate. Estate-planning attorneys said the company has turned over specific e-mails in the past, but it rarely gives access to the entire account.
"While we deeply sympathize with any grieving family, protecting the privacy of our users remains our priority," a company statement reads. "Yahoo is committed to ensuring that the activities of every person who signs up for an account -- whether through Yahoo Mail, Flickr or any other Yahoo property -- is confidential, even after their death."
(E-mail Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera at amartinez-cabrera(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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