What is a Digital Legacy?
A person’s digital footprint is the trail of activity left in data captured in digital form; on the internet, in cloud storage and on hard drives. This data can have both financial and emotional value and may become your digital legacy. Planning what happens to your digital assets at the end of your life is as important as making a will for your physical assets.
Identifying digital assets
Our Digital Legacy Toolkit has been designed to help you identify your digital assets. Once identified, digital assets are not included in a will, but can be kept in a memorandum of wishes document stored along side it or in some other secure place.
Digital Legacy and Bereavement
One of the hardest things to do after someone dies is to go through their personal belongings and decide what is to happen to them. Often this can take many months for people to face up to.
Now that most of us live a large part of our lives online, our digital property needs sorting through as well. The majority of adults in the UK use social media as regular communication tools. What will happen to these accounts after a person dies is not something that many people think about when they first open them.
How many dead Facebook “friends” do you already have? Do you get a reminder that it is their birthday?
Leaving social media accounts to be inactive increases the risk of identity theft. In addition, accounts may be closed without warning by the provider, meaning family members and friends losing treasured photographs and valuable records of their life story for ever.