Top lawyers within wills and inheritance are now modernising their approach in line with ever developing technology by ensuring clients are including passwords and usernames from their online world into their wills, protecting this side of the individuals life.
With banking, social networking and the increased ability of todays technology to hold and store some of our most prized images and music collections, an increased number of us now have an online as well as offline life, so it seems only natural that these should be passed onto someone when we ourselves pass.
Lawyers have recommended details to Facebook, Twitter, online Banking, email accounts and storage sites (for music and images) are now all included in our wills. This ensures that our affairs are tied-up after death, preventing the estate becoming liable financially, for example through magazine subscriptions. Also ensuring our online possessions are passed on too, as web-hosting company Rackspace estimates that 53% of us have treasured possessions in our online world.
Online industries are still relatively new and so remain unregulated causing significant discrepancies to exist when dealing with life after death. Banks for example require a death certificate and documentation by post, Yahoo refuses all access but will delete an account with proof of death, Facebook, with a death certificate will allow families to memorialise or shut a profile and Twitter will let families have access to tweets on receipt of a death certificate.
Possible reform is on the horizon with lawyers calling for a need for regulations and Richard Roberts, Chairman of the Law Society Wills and Equity Committee stating ‘website providers need to have a code of conduct’. All in all it seems that when preparing for the inevitable death it is a sensible piece of advice to remember the virtual world that we are all apart of as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment