Post by Willow on Feb 13, 2014 13:50:54 GMT 9.5
INTERNET use in Australia is staggering. At last count, the country had more than 12 million broadband subscribers, and that doesn’t include mobile use. Nine million Australians check Facebook every day.
Despite this mammoth investment in a personal digital footprint, few Australians consider the fate of their digital assets when they die. And in the second decade of the 21st century, that footprint is huge and growing.
For starters, there are your files held on desktops and in laptops. For many, they include music, video and photo collections, correspondence, sensitive documents about family and work matters, digitally signed contracts, medical, legal and tax information, and years and years worth of emails.
If you use cloud services such as Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive or DropBox, a lot of these same categories of files might be stored behind passwords.
There’s social media: accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Flickr and the like. They may house the only copies of precious family photos. By default, their fate will rest with the provider’s terms of service. They may remain online for years - yet inaccessible if no one has authorised access to them - or be destroyed.
And what about the mountain of apps, music and video housed on mobile devices?
The fate of our digital footprint may have been a non-issue a few years back, but as the relatively tech-savvy baby boomer generation ages, passing on digital assets is set to become a central part of will making.
You may have spent a lifetime acquiring thousands of songs, apps, TV shows and movies, but under Apple and Google services, your don’t own them outright.
Instead, you have a perpetual licence to use them until death. That means you cannot bequeath them to family or friends.
It’s an issue that surfaced in 2012 when actor Bruce Willis was falsely reported as wanting to sue Apple so he could bequeath his music accumulated on iPods, iPhones and iPads to his children.
So, outright ownership could be a factor when deciding whether to buy media in the first place, says Charlie Young, a senior associate of Brisbane law firm Bennett & Philp. “It may affect your decision on whether you spend money on these things or purchase things which you think are assets but aren’t yours at all,” he says.
Young says a will may include instructions about the disposal of digital assets but shouldn’t include technical information such as passwords.
“People are always changing accounts and updating passwords so the will is not the place to be leaving details as to your digital assets; you’re better off stating in the will the location of a document that contains all that data so the executor can look at it,” he says.
“The problem of leaving details of accounts and passwords in your will is, once probate is granted, the will becomes a public document and the data can be accessed by anyone who sees that will.”
Young says offering trusted friends, relatives and workmates access to online accounts may not be possible, even where you grant it, if the service provider’s terms and conditions doesn’t allow for it.
A service provider might retain the right to use your files after death - for instance, songs you have written or recorded that are stored there.
Some people have created wills as a digital document, says Young. Some have even created video wills using their webcam, but in Australia, wills still need to be on paper, signed and witnessed to avoid legal complications.
Last year, Young was involved in a legal case in which an exception was granted. The Supreme Court in Queensland ruled that a will typed into an iPhone Notes app, but not handwritten or signed, should stand. It involved a young international resident who used the app before taking his life.
Young says he doesn’t recommend people appointing a separate person to handle their digital assets. “In my view you should be leaving it to the executor to deal with real and personal property, including what digital assets you have out there.”
The perpetual storage of data created by deceased users is a big issue for online providers who are beginning to offer less complex options.
Google, for example, has established an “inactive account manager” so that a user can instruct Google what to do with their Gmail and data stored with other Google services should an account be inactive for a specified time.
You can choose to have data deleted after, say, three, six or 12 months, or ask Google to notify friends or make data available to selected trusted contacts. Otherwise a user’s relatives might have to seek a US court order to gain access, a Google Australia spokesman said.
Twitter says it will work with an authorised person to deactivate an account, while Facebook has two options: an account can be deleted, or the user’s timeline can be turned into a memorial.
One of the great complexities of passing on digital content is privacy. An email account, for example, may include highly confidential work correspondence you don’t want family and friends to see.
It may include medical information you want only your spouse to access or correspondence about an adoption that only your lawyer should see.
While there’s no easy answer to this, there are online services that attempt to let you pass different parts of your digital legacy on to different people.
Queenslander Jamie Wilson is about to launch yourdigitalfile.com, which lets users create a series of 256-bit private and public encryption keys so they can securely share different parts of their digital estate with different people, and with an executor.
The service specialises in the long-term storage of digital documents. The files can be digitally signed and maintain their legal status when revised as the service keeps track of all document updates. It uses the standard 100-points identity check system to address the risk of identity fraud.
An executor would get automatic access to your records at death, Wilson says. Your Digital File will also release iOS and Android apps that let users view their documents.
There are other services. British site www.cirruslegacy.com offers to keep track of email, online banking, PayPal, eBay, Amazon accounts, and web hosting - and will pass account details to loved ones or make accounts disappear - as you specify.
The online password locker PasswordBox lets users specify who gets their passwords upon death. That could include access codes for bank accounts and financial services such as PayPal.
Perpetu.co handles social media and will follow requests for passing on assets such as photo collections.
It will even send a predefined final email and tweet after your death is verified.
If you don’t care about your digital footprint, you can do nothing, but you’ll be leaving this life without having tied up the loose ends in your online world.
Increasingly, that will have consequences for your loved ones.
Despite this mammoth investment in a personal digital footprint, few Australians consider the fate of their digital assets when they die. And in the second decade of the 21st century, that footprint is huge and growing.
For starters, there are your files held on desktops and in laptops. For many, they include music, video and photo collections, correspondence, sensitive documents about family and work matters, digitally signed contracts, medical, legal and tax information, and years and years worth of emails.
If you use cloud services such as Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive or DropBox, a lot of these same categories of files might be stored behind passwords.
There’s social media: accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Flickr and the like. They may house the only copies of precious family photos. By default, their fate will rest with the provider’s terms of service. They may remain online for years - yet inaccessible if no one has authorised access to them - or be destroyed.
And what about the mountain of apps, music and video housed on mobile devices?
The fate of our digital footprint may have been a non-issue a few years back, but as the relatively tech-savvy baby boomer generation ages, passing on digital assets is set to become a central part of will making.
You may have spent a lifetime acquiring thousands of songs, apps, TV shows and movies, but under Apple and Google services, your don’t own them outright.
Instead, you have a perpetual licence to use them until death. That means you cannot bequeath them to family or friends.
It’s an issue that surfaced in 2012 when actor Bruce Willis was falsely reported as wanting to sue Apple so he could bequeath his music accumulated on iPods, iPhones and iPads to his children.
So, outright ownership could be a factor when deciding whether to buy media in the first place, says Charlie Young, a senior associate of Brisbane law firm Bennett & Philp. “It may affect your decision on whether you spend money on these things or purchase things which you think are assets but aren’t yours at all,” he says.
Young says a will may include instructions about the disposal of digital assets but shouldn’t include technical information such as passwords.
“People are always changing accounts and updating passwords so the will is not the place to be leaving details as to your digital assets; you’re better off stating in the will the location of a document that contains all that data so the executor can look at it,” he says.
“The problem of leaving details of accounts and passwords in your will is, once probate is granted, the will becomes a public document and the data can be accessed by anyone who sees that will.”
Young says offering trusted friends, relatives and workmates access to online accounts may not be possible, even where you grant it, if the service provider’s terms and conditions doesn’t allow for it.
A service provider might retain the right to use your files after death - for instance, songs you have written or recorded that are stored there.
Some people have created wills as a digital document, says Young. Some have even created video wills using their webcam, but in Australia, wills still need to be on paper, signed and witnessed to avoid legal complications.
Last year, Young was involved in a legal case in which an exception was granted. The Supreme Court in Queensland ruled that a will typed into an iPhone Notes app, but not handwritten or signed, should stand. It involved a young international resident who used the app before taking his life.
Young says he doesn’t recommend people appointing a separate person to handle their digital assets. “In my view you should be leaving it to the executor to deal with real and personal property, including what digital assets you have out there.”
The perpetual storage of data created by deceased users is a big issue for online providers who are beginning to offer less complex options.
Google, for example, has established an “inactive account manager” so that a user can instruct Google what to do with their Gmail and data stored with other Google services should an account be inactive for a specified time.
You can choose to have data deleted after, say, three, six or 12 months, or ask Google to notify friends or make data available to selected trusted contacts. Otherwise a user’s relatives might have to seek a US court order to gain access, a Google Australia spokesman said.
Twitter says it will work with an authorised person to deactivate an account, while Facebook has two options: an account can be deleted, or the user’s timeline can be turned into a memorial.
One of the great complexities of passing on digital content is privacy. An email account, for example, may include highly confidential work correspondence you don’t want family and friends to see.
It may include medical information you want only your spouse to access or correspondence about an adoption that only your lawyer should see.
While there’s no easy answer to this, there are online services that attempt to let you pass different parts of your digital legacy on to different people.
Queenslander Jamie Wilson is about to launch yourdigitalfile.com, which lets users create a series of 256-bit private and public encryption keys so they can securely share different parts of their digital estate with different people, and with an executor.
The service specialises in the long-term storage of digital documents. The files can be digitally signed and maintain their legal status when revised as the service keeps track of all document updates. It uses the standard 100-points identity check system to address the risk of identity fraud.
An executor would get automatic access to your records at death, Wilson says. Your Digital File will also release iOS and Android apps that let users view their documents.
There are other services. British site www.cirruslegacy.com offers to keep track of email, online banking, PayPal, eBay, Amazon accounts, and web hosting - and will pass account details to loved ones or make accounts disappear - as you specify.
The online password locker PasswordBox lets users specify who gets their passwords upon death. That could include access codes for bank accounts and financial services such as PayPal.
Perpetu.co handles social media and will follow requests for passing on assets such as photo collections.
It will even send a predefined final email and tweet after your death is verified.
If you don’t care about your digital footprint, you can do nothing, but you’ll be leaving this life without having tied up the loose ends in your online world.
Increasingly, that will have consequences for your loved ones.