Here's an interesting, if slightly morbid thought. When you die, what happens to all the 'stuff' you keep in The Cloud, assuming you are a user of such services as Google Docs/Drive, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Picasa etc? Clearly the services will carry on without you, but there's a pretty strong likelihood that your family will have to untangle all sorts of things within your social networks, may want or need access to some of your online assets (what about domain name registrations and the like?), and could possibly want to remove some things from the internet.
How will they do this without passwords? I can imagine a long drawn out process of having to contact every single service provider, supply death certificates and the like.
So there are a couple of ways around this. I could write down all my passwords and put them in a sealed envelope which I give to my lawyer (or some other trusted individual) for safekeeping. But then I can never change my passwords, or if I do I need to open the envelope and write them down again.
Then there is a service called LegacyLocker, who for a one time fee of US$299 (or $29 a year) will store passwords (and anything else you want them to), only releasing them to named beneficiaries on proof of your death.
Another option would be to put all of your passwords in a file which you encrypt using a strong encryption key, and then store the file somewhere publicly accessible online. You could then just put a URL and the encryption key in your sealed envelope, so this is a kind of halfway house.
Food for thought at any rate, especially if you have the plethora of online services and passwords that I have, and take sensible precautions to keep your passwords secret.
2 comments:
personally I use LastPass.com to store all my online passwords anyway, so actually the only password that my "estate" would need to know would be my master password for that account, and that would give them access to all my online accounts, other than possibly gmail which also requires two step authentication via a text to my mobile phone!
I've heard good things about LastPass as well.
Personally, I use KeePass2, which is an open source password locker, and store the database on Dropbox. So I suppose they need a couple of passwords actually, one to access the password DB (either on my computer or in Dropbox), and one to unlock it. Still, I prefer that to my late father's solution, which was an old address book with each password meticulously recorded. That worked fantastically when he died, but it wasn't exactly fire and theft proof!
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