Leaving a Password Behind

Continuing the last couple of posts on online presence, here's one more thing to thing about - now that we're increasingly managing our lives and connections online, what happens to your online identity when you die? I personaly have a friend who is no longer alive, and yet his profile is still up on one of the social networks. It's quite a dilemma - do I remove him from the "friends list"? Can, or should, his profile be changed or removed from the site?

There was a post on Slashdot not long ago asking this question:

"In the past, when a family member died, you could look through their files and address books to find all the people and businesses that should be notified that the person is deceased. Now the hard-copy address book is becoming a thing of the past. I keep some contact information in a spreadsheet, but I have many online friends that I only have contact with through web sites such as Flickr. My email accounts have many more people listed than my address book spreadsheet. I have no interest in collecting real world info from all my online contacts. The sites where I have social contact with people from around the world (obviously) require user names and passwords. Two questions: 1. How do you intend to let the executors of your estate or family members know which online sites/people you'd like them to notify of your demise? 2. How are you going to give access to the passwords, etc. needed to access those sites in a way that doesn't cause a security concern while you're still alive?"

I'll touch the subject of managing passwords in some later posts, but in my case just sending a couple of passwords to my parents mostly solves this issue in case I get struck by a bus or something tomorrow. One of the responders on Slashdot was really taking it seriously:

"I keep a USB drive in my home safe with my death kit on it. I encrypt that, copy that to CD and send it to my lawyer every few months. My sealed Will (at a different attorneys office) has a copy of the decryption key in it, and the will includes instructions on accessing the data.

I include the following:

- Personal information

-- Passwords file with usernames and passwords to all of the websites I use, personal computers and other electronic devices

-- Accounts file with basic information to all of my financial accounts, morgtages, life insurance,

-- Utilities file with all of the information about my utility services

-- Export of my address book

-- Death threats and persons of interest file (my work takes me to interesting places...)

-- House book with things like the keycode for my house, and all of the other stuff related to my house that only exists in my head otherwise

-- Auto book with copies of titles, etc

-- Letters to send

-Work file

-- Current copies of all importiant work related papers

-- Copy of my current Quickbooks file

-- A write-up of what someone needs to do in my job, along with sugestions of who to assign.

-- A copy of my personal file, complete with life insurance info

-- A usernames file with all of the UID and Passwords for running my buisness

-- A TO SHRED document, containing a list of files to be shredded upon my death"

Here's an interesting CNET article (from about two years ago) that talks more of various legal issues over online accounts, and the policies of different service providers (such as Yahoo, Google, etc.) in such cases.