Thanks to capitalism, you don’t own most of that “digital legacy” and do not have the right to bequeath or transfer ownership for the vast majority of it.
You can take ownership of a lot of it. Thanks to GDPR, major platforms offer ways to export data like photos, videos, activity on their platforms, messages etc. Store locally first, avoid over reliance on online platforms for safekeeping your data.
Also, we need to fight to keep ownership of digital media while we still can. Buy movies and music on physical media so they keep making them. Buy physical books. Buy from DRM free platforms like GoG. As convenient as it may be, avoid over reliance on streaming services.
And of course, make backups of anything you care about. Only you can keep your data safe. Online services will only keep your data as long as they can exploit it to make money.
Who wants to inherit my lemmy comments?
I’ll inherit yours if you want to inherit mine should I ever die first
We could make like a death webring.
Deal. Let’s setup dead man’s switches that will DM our passwords to one another if we fail to log in for a week.
Send me your passwords. I’ll notify you when either of you stop commenting for an unusually-long period of time.
I’m just trying to figure out a way to keep my 20+ tb of Linux isos curated and still accessible.
I plan on being dead then, so do what you want with my digital wake.
My digital legacy is going in the dumpster, unless somebody figures out how to break encryption that I’ve never shared the password for.
Probate can figure out the rest.
Share me it, ill tell my ancestors theres valuable secrets hidden within and theyl crack it with their quatum computers.
You’d be very disappointed. Most of it is stuff you can get off usenet yourself, and the rest is documents and pictures nobody cares about but me.
Books, games, music should be willable, but they are not. That we allowed ourselves to reach this particular spot is just sad.
A long time ago, I had the idea for a startup to keep digital material, including accounts, passwords, old documents, etc. in a digital vault that would be released to the next-of-kin when someone dies. It would also convert documents to newer formats so your old unpublished WordPerfect novel could be opened and read by the grandkids (should they choose).
Problem is, nobody would (or should) trust a startup with that material. This is stuff that should be around for many decades and most startups go out of business.
Bitwarden does all that. If you pay the subscription you get a GB of storage and delegate emergency access to other people.
Does Bitwarden have emergency delegation now? I’d been waiting for it
This is stuff that should be around for many decades
Should it? 99.99% of my email doesn’t need to be around for more than a few days, let alone decades. And that number will only go up when I’m dead. Really important stuff, like ownership titles, is on file in paper here in my house and with the relevant title agency.
A couple years ago, I would have agreed. Most of our email is junk. But nowadays, you can have an LLM digest and summarize it for you. That could also be a service the legacy system offers. Grandkids can just ask for a free-form search term without having to wade through everything.
I am putting it on my will that before I die all my social media has to be marked as being one of the first really stupid AI Agents.
