This article featured in PC Advisor in September 2013 and
is reproduced with their kind permission.
It might be something that many of us prefer to keep at the back of our
minds, but there are times when we need to give some thought to what happens
after we die. Even when we do consider our mortality, though, the fate of our
online property is something that often gets overlooked.
Much of this property has sentimental value - for example email folders, photographs and
documents stored in the cloud, and our presence on social media sites - but it
can also have financial value.
Either way, you probably don't want it to evaporate. You might also want to
disable or deactivate an account to prevent, say, people making unwanted posts
on a Facebook wall.
Yet succession law is somewhat vague about some types of online property with
the result that, unless you've shared your passwords, your relatives or the
beneficiaries in your will may be unable to inherit it.
Here we look at what UK law says about the subject, at how the big companies
who administer our online assets interpret that law, and at what you can do to
ensure that your wishes are met.
What happens to your online accounts when you die: the
law
To understand the legal situation we spoke to solicitor Ian Bond, Partner at
Higgs & Sons, and Member of the Law Society's Wills & Equity Committee
who told us that, according to law in England and Wales, "it is the duty of a
personal representative to collect and get in the real and personal estate of
the deceased and administer it according to law". "If the deceased had digital
assets", he said, "the personal representatives have a duty to protect those
assets and collect them for the beneficiaries".
We'll see later how this applies to online assets that have some financial
value but, to start, we'll think about online property that has mainly
sentimental value. Here, things are rarely as simple as Ian's initial statement
might suggest as he went on to explain.
"Digital assets are mostly stored on shared servers; the service providers
may be based in a different country from their users, and they may store data on
servers in many countries, making it unclear whose laws would apply".
To clarify, he gave an example. "Just because a user dies in London with a
Facebook or Twitter account, it doesn't mean that English law will apply in
dealing with those digital assets", he explained. "In the absence of clarity on
which countries' laws apply, how a digital service-provider deals with an asset
following the death of the user becomes a matter for the provider's terms of
use. No uniformity exists so, in reality, each separate digital service provider
sits in final judgment when it comes to deciding the fate of the digital
assets."