The Long Now Blog

Alex Steffen sent in a note about this interesting new service that allows your estate to elegantly handle your digital assets, passwords, accounts etc after your passing.

As people increasingly document their lives digitally, and move the majority of their interactions to the internet, there is a strange undeadness that happens to their online presence after they are gone.  I have had first hand experience with this in my family last year, it is very difficult to get all the passwords and account logins sorted so that you can set everything straight once someone is gone. I would love to hear from someone who has used this service…

I am not exactly sure how much better it is than telling a trusted a friend or relative where to find this information, or using an lawyer to hang onto it.  But their plans start at free for a limited account, and go up to $299 for a lifetime paid unlimited account, so that is likely less than you would spend with a lawyer, and I suspect this is easier to keep updated.

It is good to see economies popping up around long term storage of digital assets.  However the idea of storing those assets for long periods of time with an internet startup is likely a dubious venture at best.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 10:41 am and is filed under Digital Dark Age, Futures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.