If you have specific desires regarding the management of your digital presence after you’re gone, proactive measures are necessary. Otherwise, the fate of your online legacy may be dictated by circumstances rather than your intentions. Your online accounts, such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Apple, or Amazon, constitute your digital legacy, and the responsibility to preserve or relinquish it lies with you.
Following your passing, some of your online accounts may endure indefinitely, while others may deactivate automatically due to inactivity. Moreover, certain platforms offer mechanisms that enable you to grant access to family and friends for posthumous management of your accounts.
Given the pervasive nature of social media and digital platforms in our daily lives, these digital assets often hold significant personal value and can contribute to your legacy. You might choose to safeguard this digital footprint or opt for its permanent deletion upon your demise.
Whether you seek to preserve or erase your digital presence, proactive planning is essential to ensure your wishes are honored. In this regard, we’ll explore how various popular digital platforms handle your account posthumously. Additionally, we’ll discuss incorporating these digital assets into your estate plan to ensure they are appropriately addressed, managed, and passed on in the event of your incapacity or death.
Unless you choose to have your account deleted, Facebook offers what’s known as a “Legacy Contact” for managing your profile after death. Using a Legacy Contact, you can choose someone to control your account’s operation and functionality after you pass away.
Following your death, Facebook first memorializes your account. Once memorialized, the word “Remembering” is added to your profile name, and only confirmed friends can view your profile or find it in a search. Depending on your privacy settings, friends and family members can post content and share memories on your memorialized timeline.
However, memorialized accounts are locked, so your original content cannot be altered or deleted, even if someone has your password. Your Facebook account can be memorialized regardless of whether or not you select a legacy contact. To have your account memorialized, Facebook simply requires your family or friends to provide proof of your death using a special request form and evidence of death, such as an obituary.
If you’ve chosen a Legacy Contact, that individual can manage your memorialized account based on the permissions you’ve granted him or her. Some of the actions your legacy contact can perform include writing pinned posts, choosing who can view and post tributes on your profile, responding to new friend requests, updating your cover and profile images, and requesting your account’s closure.
However, there are certain actions your Legacy Contact will not be able to perform. This includes logging into your account as you, viewing your direct messages, removing your friends, or making new friend requests. For more in-depth coverage of Facebook’s legacy contact service and how it fits in with your estate planning, read our previous article, Managing Your Digital Afterlife: A Guide To Facebook’s Legacy Contact.
GMAIL, GOOGLE, & YOUTUBE
The Internet titan Google owns several of the most popular web services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Photos, and Google Play. In order to request how you want these accounts managed after your death, Google offers a function called Inactive Account Manager.
Using this function, you must first choose the amount of time—3, 6, 12, or 18 months—that must pass without any activity before the Inactive Account Manager service is triggered. The service lets you select up to 10 different people, who can access your account once Inactive Account Manager goes into effect. You can specify the data those individuals will be allowed to access, including things like photos, contacts, emails, documents, and other content.
With Inactive Account Manager, you can also opt to have your account deleted. If so, you can have Google simply delete all of your content, or you can share your content with your designated contacts before deletion. If you share your content, your contacts will be able to access and download data from your account for 3 months before it’s deleted.
Should you choose to have your account deleted, your Gmail messages will be permanently deleted, and all data and content in all of your other Google-based accounts like YouTube, Google Drive, and Google Photos will also be deleted. If you die without setting up Inactive Account Manager, Google will automatically delete your account following two years of inactivity.
Finally, because Google owns YouTube, and YouTube videos have the potential to earn revenue indefinitely, it’s vital that you use the Inactive Account Manager to protect this potentially lucrative asset following your death. Additionally, you’ll also want to include these intangible assets in your estate plan, so they can be protected and passed on to your loved ones in the most beneficial way possible.
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