Your digital life will no doubt continue after you are gone. That’s good and bad news for many of us. But regardless of the quality of that news, what to do? Who’s going to take care of all your online content after you are gone? Well, first check the terms of service agreement you have with your online provider. For example, Google’s Terms of Service says:
“11.1 … By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
So if all you’re worried about is your Google content, forget it. Google knows what to do with it. What about Facebook? Facebook, like Google, knows what to do with your content:
“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to … [Facebook] an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”
OK. I couldn’t resist that. But to be fair, both Google and Facebook have provisions to revoke their non-exclusive licenses to your content if you remove all of it from their sites. But do catch the provisions on archiving. You may still be infamous in the long run.
Moving on, if you have other accounts that warrant some intervention after you pass on, e.g., online bank accounts, credit card accounts, security exchanges, etc., and you want your beneficiaries to have access to these accounts, there is now a service that will keep the information for you and transfer it to a beneficiary for safe-keeping. Check out the Legacy Locker.
