This is more or less what my lawyer suggested when I set up my will with her.
Apparently very few people have ever asked her about this.
I don’t think it has yet become part of the checklist for arranging one’s affairs.
Apparently very few people have ever asked her about this.
I don’t think it has yet become part of the checklist for arranging one’s affairs.
We have a lot of estate laws for arranging physical goods. We have almost no digital asset rights that survive our passing. Most of our accounts are explicitly locked to our lifetimes in Terms of Services agreements (generally, they are between me and only me and the service).
There's likely going to be some big political battles over the next decade or two as folks with big Steam collections or Movies Anywhere accounts or Dropbox file stores pass on and try to pass those digital "assets" to surviving family members.
So my "simple" idea of "I want to build a tool for lawyers to securely write down and file people's passwords in their wills/trusts" became a giant rabbit hole of "securing the will/trust may not be the hard part, making sure those passwords are useful to survivors is a very hard problem that currently everyone is kicking the can on".
We don't have good legal protections for that at all. Consider that some Terms of Service agreements, sharing a password at all, no matter the reason, is itself a breach of Terms of Service. That most services may not enforce such ToS clauses today doesn't imply that they won't start enforcing them tomorrow.
(Multi-factor is another land mine mess in digital asset rights. We barely understand how biometric locks should affect things like privacy laws, let alone has anyone really started talking about how you deal with a dead relative's thumbprint or "face ID" in their absence. Passwords are at least physically transferable, a lot of MFA, especially biometrics, is not.)
Which is a big part of why it needs to be a political lobby or working group: lawyers don't think anything about the ad hoc cases ("give this password to my heirs") because it is isn't their responsibility at that point other than storage and it isn't distinct from the rest of wills/trust documents. Then there is the problem that it isn't yet common enough for them to abstract it into a "class" and/or yet think to ask every client of theirs for passwords for continuity of digital estates/digital asset planning. As soon as they do start to consider the repercussions of the latter is when they do start to get antsy about their responsibilities (is it legal for every service, the answer to which is currently "no" [the discussion above], and then increasingly complicated follow ups such as can you "split an account among multiple heirs" and "what's the retail value if it needs to be auctioned" and so on and so forth). Lawyers at that point want the comfort of laws to back them up in any such responsibilities, at which time it looks necessary to start a political lobby to build digital assets rights into laws.