When you die, your relatives will be sad and (depending on the circumstances of your death) possibly left scrambling to make arrangements for your remains, effects, and estate.
The digital afterlife of your online accounts has gotten less fraught since I wrote about it six years ago, with digital platforms and login managers adding in tools and policies to preserve or manage online accounts after your death.
But chances are that when your loved ones are trying to figure out what to do with you and all you leave behind, they're not going to be skilled operators of these digital memorial systems. They will be slow to adopt them and will struggle to use them.
But criminals have had plenty of dead people to practice on, and have become virtuoso hijackers of the internet of the dead. They've also figured out that duplicating the accounts of dead people is an excellent way to make plausible seeming fakes that are likely to last longer than hijacked identities of the living.
Chris Boyd's Manchester B-Sides presentation on The Digital Entropy of Death builds on his recent written work on the subject. It's an eye-opening look into the possible security risks of digital death, along with some practical advice for "taking ownership of your digital accounts before somebody else does."
The manner in which they hand over the password manager account is incredibly important, too. Is it a physical thing? A login written on paper? Something digital? Is it secure? Maybe it’s a hard drive. Is it encrypted? How will it be updated with new logins/ changes to passwords? Does the relative live nearby if it’s physical? If they live far away, would something purely online make more sense?These are all important questions that need to be thrashed out long before handing account information over, and it’s probably a bit much to put the onus on the recipient to start bolting security gates you may have left wide open. Do some pre-handover diligence, and make some time to ensure everything is locked down tight. If there’s anything hugely important you need them to know, tell them in advance—don’t hand over a hard drive and ask them why they didn’t make a backup two months after the thing has fallen into the bathtub.
The digital entropy of death: what happens to your online accounts when you die [Christopher Boyd/Malware Bytes]
What happens to your online accounts when you die? [John Leyden/The Register]
