Digital end of life planning saves your loved ones from a little extra anguish

Japan’s National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start “digital end of life planning” and offered tips on how to do it. The Center’s somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn’t know their usernames or passwords. The resulting “digital legacy” can be unpleasant to resolve, the agency warns, so suggested four steps to simplify ensure our digital legacies aren’t complicated:

  • Ensuring family members can unlock your smartphone or computer in case of emergency;
  • Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords;
  • Consider putting those details in a document intended to be made available when your life ends;
  • Use a service that allows you to designate someone to have access to your smartphone and other accounts once your time on Earth ends.

The Center suggests now is the time for it to make this suggestion because it is aware of struggles to discover and resolve ongoing expenses after death. With smartphones ubiquitous, the org fears more people will find themselves unable to resolve their loved ones’ digital affairs – and powerless to stop their credit cards being charged for services the departed cannot consume.

  • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Password manager with a delegated access structure is the way to go. If my sister (who I have delegated to) requests access, provides a death certificate,and waits some cool-off period, she gets access to the portions of my password vault I designate. I will grant her access to my financials upon death, but not social media and private stuff.

    Versus writing it down and giving it to a lawyer who probably has the same opsec as their 1920s counterpart.

      • FierySpectre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        Bitwarden has this, you can set your next-of-kin and they’ll be able to get access. (They have to wait like 2 weeks or so and I imagine all sorts of alarm bells will go off if they try this while you’re alive). Might be a premium only feature though idk.

        • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          The BitWarden Emergency Access feature is premium-only to setup. And it doesn’t have the death certificate/identity verification piece to it, which I prefer not having anyway.

        • Redex@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          Wait how does that work? I thought Bitwarden couldn’t access your passwords, how could they grant a third party access to your passwords without your master password?

          • magz :3@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            my understanding is:

            1. the emergency contact sends their public key to the owner of the vault
            2. the owner encrypts the key for the vault using said public key and stores the result on bitwarden’s servers
            3. the emergency contact can now request the decryption key from bitwarden, which they will receive either if the vault owner manually approves the request or if the request is not rejected within a certain amount of time
            4. the emergency contact can then decrypt the stored vault key using their private key, and use that to access the vault

            source