Seven Options for Handling Your Digital Life in the Afterlife

Many services now exist that allow users to update, delete, or transfer online account information upon the user’s death. Seven of these services are detailed below:

1. Entrustet allows users to pass digital assets through an account holder. The assets are then passed to the user’s designated executor and up to ten heirs. These digital assets can include anything from blogs and emails to financial accounts and social networks.
2. Legacy Locker, one of first services of its kind, gives users the choice of three pricing plans for digital assets transfers.
3. My Webwill allows a user’s heir to transfer or change the user’s online accounts after the user’s death. These accounts include LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and more.
4. Futuris.tk give users the ability to schedule online messages up to fifty years in advance. The service requires that users elect a trusted source to notify Futuris.tk of the user’s passing.
5. Deathswitch has users create pre-written messages designated to specific contacts. Deathswitch then asks the user, periodically, to provide a pre-determined password, and if the user fails to do so, the service assumes the user is dead and sends out the messages.
6. GreatGoodbye allows users to entrust a trusted source with an activation code. When the user passes away, the trusted source can use the code to send pre-saved emails, photos, videos, and MP3s.
7. AssetLock lets users store large amounts of important information, including estate plans, financial information, insurance policies, pre-written emails, directives, and account passwords.

See Erica Swallow, 7 Ways to Handle Digital Life After Death, My Life Scoop, Oct. 4, 2010.

Special thanks to Bradley Clark (attorney, Austin, Texas) for bringing this article to my attention.