We spend half our lives online…buying and selling stuff, creating social media pages, passwords, gaming personas…so what happens to our online life when we pass away in real life. Someone needs to manage and/or shut down all those accounts…and to do that, they will need access.  To solve this issue, online companies are setting up websites to help you manage your digital persona after you pass away as well as to create memorials for loved ones that have passed away.  The online world has become so important to people, that your digital life and digital memories of loved ones are now being preserved by a host of companies.

In case you haven’t thought about all of your personal data that is stored on the web, here are some examples of online information that could be/should be preserved and communicated to someone after you pass away… online banking/stock passwords and transactions, copies of wills, bank accounts, gaming personas such as Second life that will continue to live (at least a little while), eBay items that are sold and PayPal accounts, domains that are owned that must be managed…. the  list goes on and on… the list gets big in a hurry.

More and more people are beginning to recognize that your passwords and online info needs to be passed on to your wife or husband, but the offline solutions don’t really work in the online world.  For our real lives, we have safety deposit boxes and wills…but the online world that is full of passwords and logins that aren’t really written down anywhere.  And what is worse, think of the bind that we will leave for loved ones or friends in if they have to try to figure all of this information out after we are gone.

There are a number of companies that are working on solving this issue… here are just a few….www.legacylocker.com; www.assetlock.com, www.slightlymorbid.com, www.findagrave.com, www.deathswitch.com, www.eternalspace.com, …interesting names, huh.   More are available and they are easy to find on your favorite search engine.

A Legacy Locker account costs $29.99 a year. While setting up an account, you specify who gets access to your info should you no longer be in need of signing on…if you know what I mean!  Once you pass away, your designees contact Legacy Locker and once a verification process is completed, the information is turned over to you.

There is one very big risk to all of this… hacking.  While it is great that companies are working to solve this need, this creates a hacking bonanza or nightmare depending on how you look at it. Security is going to be critical for this information, and this means that you need to be familiar with the security policies of any company prior to hiring them.

So what are some of the services that you can hire these types of companies to do?  Well, everything from a secure online safe deposit box for digital copies of documents, wishes, letters and emails, to planning real life activities – the funeral, the memorial, the grave site, to virtual memorial pages for videos, pictures and tributes.

The interesting trend here is that as our online lives continue to become more important, the early adopters of online technology are beginning to think about their own mortality…this is a logical thought pattern to follow… when the internet was new, so were our accounts and online lives…now it is 15 years later, and the internet is much more important to us.

Be sure to do your due diligence should you consider hiring one of these firms.  I will continue to keep you posted as this develops.