I know almost nothing about my paternal grandfather, who died a few months before I was born. I’ve seen photographs of him, examined census records in which his name appears, and heard a few stories, but that’s about it. And of his parents I know even less. There are complicated reasons why so little information about these family members survived, but the fact remains that whatever documents or genealogical data I might dig up, I’ll never be able to know what they were like. What were their interests, hopes, beliefs, and fears? Did they have a sense of humor? How did they interact with other people? Were they kind or cruel, interesting or dull? The answers to all such questions are beyond my reach.
By contrast, my descendants should have a bountiful supply of information about me. During my lifetime I’ve written many thousands of pages of books and articles, recorded hundreds of hours of audio and video, bared my soul in innumerable email messages, and posed for countless photos. I don’t fancy myself a person of particular historical significance, but I would at the very least like family members in future generations to be able to find out what sort of person I was—what made me tick. And as long as I preserve all that data carefully, they’ll be able to do just that. They won’t have to rely on faded photos in a shoebox and half-forgotten, second-hand stories. And whether they consider me a hero, a villain, a champion, or a loser, at least their feelings about me will have a pretty strong basis in reality.
That’s a big part of how I envision my own digital legacy. In this chapter, I want to help you get a sense of what yours might entail. Crucially, that includes not just the things you’ll preserve for future generations, or even the stuff you’ll want your next of kin to know about in the days leading up to your funeral. It also entails information and concrete steps that can improve your life today (see How Digital Legacy Planning Can Improve Your Life Now). At the same time, the complexities of preserving your digital legacy may be more involved than you imagine, and I hope to give you a realistic overview of the challenges you’ll face (see Understand the Challenges). I also offer a few quick reminders about conventional, non-digital estate planning that you’ll want to take action on if you haven’t already done so (see Review: Estate Planning Basics).
I’ve given some examples of what I mean by a digital legacy, and although the details of your vision may differ from mine, the underlying concept is this:
You get to make decisions now about what will happen to your digital data after you’re dead—and far into the future.
If you’re a public figure, or if you’ve done things that people are likely to write about in history books a century from now, you’ve probably already begun to take steps to insure that future generations look back on your life in a complimentary way. But even those of us who consider ourselves ordinary folk usually care about how we’ll be remembered by our friends, family members, and descendants. My great-grandchildren, should I have any, probably won’t see a statue of me in the park or sing songs commemorating my mighty deeds. But they might like to know what Grandpa Joe was like way back in the olden days of the early twenty-first century, because their lives will have been shaped, in part, by my choices.
Your actions, and the chains of events they cause, are part of your legacy. Your possessions, and indeed your family members themselves, are part of your legacy too. But in this day and age in which nearly everything is digital, when most people carry supercomputers (with built-in cameras, microphones, and video recorders) wherever they go, and when your every thought and emotion can be instantly transmitted around the world via social media, the data you create and accumulate over a lifetime is likely a larger part of your legacy than your money and house. It will almost certainly last much longer, too!
So, when I speak of your digital legacy, I’m thinking of the following:
Whether your fondest desire is to be remembered forever or to be forgotten immediately, you can craft the digital legacy you prefer. But if you do nothing, your legacy will be entirely in the hands of other people, with lives and preferences of their own, and however much care they devote to preserving your data, it may not turn out the way you would have liked.
Apart from giving you greater peace of mind, a regular will won’t do much to improve your life right now. But planning for your digital legacy can serve lots of purposes while you’re still alive. For example:
Those same instructions can enable someone to take over for you temporarily if you go on vacation, or become sick or injured. Plus, they can help you remember how to do tasks you perform infrequently, so you don’t have to figure them out from scratch each time.
In addition, you may well undertake improvements in the ways you back up your data and handle passwords; eliminate unneeded accounts, files, and apps; learn more about your family history; and even get to know yourself a bit better.
Leaving your house or your car to someone is relatively simple. I mean, it’s not truly simple, as in merely handing over a key—there’s all sorts of paperwork, and there are legal and tax considerations, and so on. But there are also well-worn procedures in place for facilitating such handovers, and if your will states that your son gets the house, then there’s little else you, while still alive, need to do to make that happen; your son (along with your executor, lawyer, spouse, and other relatives) will deal with all the irritating details when the time comes.
At first blush, it may seem as though your digital data is far easier to pass on. If your data is on a computer, why, someone can just take your computer and have all your data, right? Well…kinda sorta maybe but not really. Preserving your digital data for the future is in fact considerably more challenging. Here are just a few of the reasons:
And who knows what interfaces will exist on tomorrow’s devices? In the 1990s, computers and peripherals often had SCSI ports, for example, but I have no idea how I’d go about reading data from a SCSI drive today. I cover issues like these in Preserve Your Data for Posterity.
In other words: you can’t search for something if you don’t know what you’re looking for, and I don’t think anyone is going to take the time to examine a million files individually just to see if I might have used a clever turn of phrase in one of them. I discuss organizational issues in Inventory Other Personal Data.
For these and many other reasons, the task of ensuring that all (and only) the right people can access your crucial data in the future is more complicated than it initially appears—and that’s exactly what this book aims to help you with. Every issue can be overcome with careful thought and planning.
Your digital legacy is intended to be a part of your overall estate plan—not a substitute for it. If you haven’t already dealt with the other steps, I urge you to do so—perhaps even before following the instructions in this book. Life is too uncertain to leave these important things to chance.
I am not by any means an expert in conventional estate planning, but as a quick reminder, a typical person will want to include (at least) the following elements:
All these elements come in many varieties and are governed by rules that vary by jurisdiction. If you’re just getting started with estate planning, a site like GYST can help you find the resources to work through each of these items. Some of them you can do yourself (possibly even for free), while others will require the paid services of a lawyer or other professional.