Thanks to capitalism, you don’t own most of that “digital legacy” and do not have the right to bequeath or transfer ownership for the vast majority of it.
You can take ownership of a lot of it. Thanks to GDPR, major platforms offer ways to export data like photos, videos, activity on their platforms, messages etc. Store locally first, avoid over reliance on online platforms for safekeeping your data.
Also, we need to fight to keep ownership of digital media while we still can. Buy movies and music on physical media so they keep making them. Buy physical books. Buy from DRM free platforms like GoG. As convenient as it may be, avoid over reliance on streaming services.
And of course, make backups of anything you care about. Only you can keep your data safe. Online services will only keep your data as long as they can exploit it to make money.
This is something that I’ve really been thinking about lately as I get older and my kids start to grow up. I’ve got 60TB+ of digital data, including all my families history of photos and videos digitized which are backed up to 3 separate cloud services, onenote filled with information, password managers filled with logins and details, etc, along with my Steam/Xbox/Playstation/Epic/GOG/etc accounts with 1000+ games on them.
I’m tempted to make a website/app to try and tie it all together in an easy way tbh.
If you do, make sure you build in a note taking/comment feature so they can track how its changed from what you’ve documented.
backed up to 3 separate cloud services
Why so many?
I already pay for storage for one of them for other reasons (M365), but I much prefer Google Photos as a service, especially for sharing photos and albums, so I pay for that too. The third is just some crazy good deal with “iDrive Photos” where it’s $5/year for unlimited upload from my phone haha.
Also in case anything happens to one of my accounts, especially since one is tied to my Xbox account and I have kids.
Gotcha, and yes, another friend of mine uses iDrive for its insane deal!
My digital legacy is going in the dumpster, unless somebody figures out how to break encryption that I’ve never shared the password for.
Probate can figure out the rest.
Someday the hashes will be cracked.
It’ll be possible. Whether someone will take the time and cost on are another question altogether.
Share me it, ill tell my ancestors theres valuable secrets hidden within and theyl crack it with their quatum computers.
You’d be very disappointed. Most of it is stuff you can get off usenet yourself, and the rest is documents and pictures nobody cares about but me.
My mother passed away before the internet evolved into something a middle aged woman would enjoy using.
I went searching for anything I could find, and I did manage to come across an ancient website for alumni of her highschool where her name and email were listed. Sort of blew my mind, she’d obviously come across the website and emailed the admin to add her contact info.
This would’ve been 8 or 9 years before Facebook blew up. Man, she would’ve loved Facebook and Farmville. She’d probably be doing Wordle every day and be a Rachel Maddow wine mom if she’d survived.
How much I wish she’d had a significant online presence so I could look her up and sort of connect with her again in some way.
I’m lucky
I have no children, and never will
My family and I aren’t close
My fiancée and I met through the erotic content that I create, and all my friends are well aware of it
My image has already been shared far and wide (without my permission), so that ship has already sailed
I’ll be dead, and nobody will be worried about my digital legacy whatsoever
I know, however, that I’m very much the exception and not the rule
Who wants to inherit my lemmy comments?
I’ll inherit yours if you want to inherit mine should I ever die first
We could make like a death webring.
Deal. Let’s setup dead man’s switches that will DM our passwords to one another if we fail to log in for a week.
Send me your passwords. I’ll notify you when either of you stop commenting for an unusually-long period of time.
I’m just trying to figure out a way to keep my 20+ tb of Linux isos curated and still accessible.
I flat out told my family “when I die, just burn it all down and buy basic consumer stuff.
There’s no way my tech would survive for more than a handful of years without a proper sysadmin, and the entire thing would be two dead HDDs away from total data loss.
I hate how true this is.
A long time ago, I had the idea for a startup to keep digital material, including accounts, passwords, old documents, etc. in a digital vault that would be released to the next-of-kin when someone dies. It would also convert documents to newer formats so your old unpublished WordPerfect novel could be opened and read by the grandkids (should they choose).
Problem is, nobody would (or should) trust a startup with that material. This is stuff that should be around for many decades and most startups go out of business.
Bitwarden does all that. If you pay the subscription you get a GB of storage and delegate emergency access to other people.
Does Bitwarden have emergency delegation now? I’d been waiting for it
At least for the 2 years I’m using it
This could be a non-profit funded by participants and government grants.
This is stuff that should be around for many decades
Should it? 99.99% of my email doesn’t need to be around for more than a few days, let alone decades. And that number will only go up when I’m dead. Really important stuff, like ownership titles, is on file in paper here in my house and with the relevant title agency.
A couple years ago, I would have agreed. Most of our email is junk. But nowadays, you can have an LLM digest and summarize it for you. That could also be a service the legacy system offers. Grandkids can just ask for a free-form search term without having to wade through everything.
I plan on being dead then, so do what you want with my digital wake.
Books, games, music should be willable, but they are not. That we allowed ourselves to reach this particular spot is just sad.
In 2017, I helped develop key recommendations for planning your digital legacy. These include:
- creating an inventory of accounts and assets, recording usernames and login information, and if possible, downloading personal content for local storage
- specifying preferences in writing, noting wishes about what content should be preserved, deleted, or shared – and with whom
- using password managers to securely store and share access to information and legacy preferences
- designating a digital executor who has legal authority to carry out your digital legacy wishes and preferences, ideally with legal advice
- using legacy features on available platforms, such as Facebook’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, or Apple’s Digital Legacy.
“You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity”
Instead you could track your listening habits on ListenBrainz. In doing so you safeguard yourself from Spotify ever restricting access to your data, data which they consider theirs. For ListenBrainz of course you must be willing to share your data freely, but it will be for the benefit of all, whilst if you don’t it will only be used for the benefit of Spotify corporates. You’ll help facilitate a healthy online music ecosystem, because people can built apps on top of the ListenBrainz dataset. You can get recommendations from algorithms of your choice instead of having to rely on Spotifys algorithms.
Not working for Listenbrainz in any way, just an enthousiastic user that plugs it when he sees fit :)
My plan is: baleted
I am putting it on my will that before I die all my social media has to be marked as being one of the first really stupid AI Agents.
I at least hope I will been remembered.
