Protecting Your Digital Assets, Your Data at Online Backup Companies, After Death

By Ian Hardy 
BBC Click

September 25, 2009

Thanks to an endless stream of gadgets many of us are in heaven when it comes to technology. Do-it-all phones, never ending storage, social web sites - to many this is what life is all about.

At some point though drop dead gorgeous gizmos outlive their owners. But once we die, what happens to the digital life we leave behind?

Plan ahead

As might be expected, policies vary from company to company. E-mail providers will often give up the deceased’s password on receipt of a death certificate from the family.

Social site Facebook offers to memorialize a page by freezing it in time, but Flickr refuses all access to an account and Twitter does not even address death directly in its FAQ.

A new book, Total Recall by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, raises intriguing questions about …

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