it is only good if that was the intention of the descendant, unfortunately we as a culture do not properly plan for death there for I can see a huge amount of data being lost even if the descendant wished for their family to see the data. (or did not have a strong desire for data to die with them)
Yeah, I wonder how many people share their passwords with their loved ones while they’re good and healthy, but disaster can strike anytime. Im thinking of an idea for a service to ping one every 6 months and if no answer is given back in another 6 months, then to allow a designated person to have all pasawords and keys. Some kind of digital will executor or something of the sorts
My brother died unexpectedly in his 30s, after years living and studying in another country. Some things:
I hope we found every relevant friend and invited them to the funeral. But as he travelled a lot, they are all over the planet, and the chance we found them all is basically zero. The only reason we found out about his first serious girlfriend was because he told about her a week before on the phone.
We went to his country, hired a van, stuffed cleaned out his apartment, cancelled every service we found out, then went back home. We presume everything settled, but you have to know about a service to cancel it. I hope whoever hired his house did not get too much trouble with angry debtors and such.
We found out about sides of him we never knew about. There might be other things, we'll never know. This is very hard for my parents.
Some unscrupulous companies read obituaries and send a bill. Really. We had 2 companies billing him for services never delivered, just hoping the heirs would pay them.
We did not manage to enter his gmail account. Google did not grant us access even when presenting a death certificate. They suggested we contacted an USA judge, and required everything done according to USA law, even if everything relevant happened in the EU. I still feel bitter about their total lack of sympathy and cooperation.
I assume it depends upon the person. For me: If I am dead, why not. Our main purpose was followiup of whoever would mail him, just as would happen with physical letters.
We did in fact have access for a few hours by using his cell phone, for which he gave us the pin code. But moving the phone to another country triggerred some safety mode and Google wanted the full password.
Trouble with Google was: They agreed we had right for access. But their process was built with the assumption that only people in the USA could die.
Banking, Utilities, Retirement Info, Document Repository that has import info about my Assets and my will, Code repositories, Credentials to my home Servers that run the Home Automation, Media Center, etc etc etc...
All Kinds of things, I am 99% paperless at this point so all my info is digital...
These people never run into a real world scenario. I did and putting the pieces together is a frustrating experience which you never know if you will ever succeed. Eventually more generations will run into this and find a common path for these scenarios
