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.
Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it
Submitted 1 week ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 6 days ago
tibi@lemmy.world 6 days ago
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.
kandoh@reddthat.com 6 days ago
My mother passed away before the internet evolved into something a middle aged woman would enjoy using.
I went searching for anything I could find, and I did manage to come across an ancient website for alumni of her highschool where her name and email were listed. Sort of blew my mind, she’d obviously come across the website and emailed the admin to add her contact info.
This would’ve been 8 or 9 years before Facebook blew up. Man, she would’ve loved Facebook and Farmville. She’d probably be doing Wordle every day and be a Rachel Maddow wine mom if she’d survived.
How much I wish she’d had a significant online presence so I could look her up and sort of connect with her again in some way.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 week ago
This is something that I’ve really been thinking about lately as I get older and my kids start to grow up. I’ve got 60TB+ of digital data, including all my families history of photos and videos digitized, onenote filled with information, password managers filled with logins and details, etc, along with my Steam/Xbox/Playstation/Epic/GOG/etc accounts with 1000+ games on them.
I’m tempted to make a website/app to try and tie it all together in an easy way tbh.
lectricleopard@lemmy.world 6 days ago
If you do, make sure you build in a note taking/comment feature so they can track how its changed from what you’ve documented.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 6 days ago
backed up to 3 separate cloud services
Why so many?
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 6 days ago
I already pay for storage for one of them for other reasons (M365), but I much prefer Google Photos as a service, especially for sharing photos and albums, so I pay for that too. The third is just some crazy good deal with “iDrive Photos” where it’s $5/year for unlimited upload from my phone haha.
Also in case anything happens to one of my accounts, especially since one is tied to my Xbox account and I have kids.
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafe 6 days ago
Someday the hashes will be cracked.
lectricleopard@lemmy.world 6 days ago
It’ll be possible. Whether someone will take the time and cost on are another question altogether.
Goretantath@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Share me it, ill tell my ancestors theres valuable secrets hidden within and theyl crack it with their quatum computers.
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 6 days ago
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.
FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com 1 week ago
I’m lucky
I have no children, and never will
My family and I aren’t close
My fiancée and I met through the erotic content that I create, and all my friends are well aware of it
My image has already been shared far and wide (without my permission), so that ship has already sailed
I’ll be dead, and nobody will be worried about my digital legacy whatsoever
I know, however, that I’m very much the exception and not the rule
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 6 days ago
Who wants to inherit my lemmy comments?
Gonzako@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’ll inherit yours if you want to inherit mine should I ever die first
billwashere@lemmy.world 6 days ago
We could make like a death webring.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 6 days ago
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.
billwashere@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’m just trying to figure out a way to keep my 20+ tb of Linux isos curated and still accessible.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
I flat out told my family “when I die, just burn it all down and buy basic consumer stuff.
There’s no way my tech would survive for more than a handful of years without a proper sysadmin, and the entire thing would be two dead HDDs away from total data loss.
billwashere@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I hate how true this is.
fubarx@lemmy.world 6 days ago
A long time ago, I had the idea for a startup to keep digital material, including accounts, passwords, old documents, etc. ina 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.
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Bitwarden does all that. If you pay the subscription you get a GB of storage and delegate emergency access to other people.
4am@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Does Bitwarden have emergency delegation now? I’d been waiting for it
odelik@lemmy.today 6 days ago
This could be a non-profit funded by participants and government grants.
catloaf@lemm.ee 6 days ago
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.
fubarx@lemmy.world 6 days ago
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.
normalexit@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I plan on being dead then, so do what you want with my digital wake.
zephorah@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Books, games, music should be willable, but they are not. That we allowed ourselves to reach this particular spot is just sad.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
In 2017, I helped develop key recommendations for planning your digital legacy. These include:
- creating an inventory of accounts and assets, recording usernames and login information, and if possible, downloading personal content for local storage
- specifying preferences in writing, noting wishes about what content should be preserved, deleted, or shared – and with whom
- using password managers to securely store and share access to information and legacy preferences
- designating a digital executor who has legal authority to carry out your digital legacy wishes and preferences, ideally with legal advice
- using legacy features on available platforms, such as Facebook’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, or Apple’s Digital Legacy.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
My plan is: baleted
96VXb9ktTjFnRi@feddit.nl 6 days ago
“You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity”
Instead you could track your listening habits on ListenBrainz. In doing so you safeguard yourself from Spotify ever restricting access to your data, data which they consider theirs. For ListenBrainz of course you must be willing to share your data freely, but it will be for the benefit of all, whilst if you don’t it will only be used for the benefit of Spotify corporates. You’ll help facilitate a healthy online music ecosystem, because people can built apps on top of the ListenBrainz dataset. You can get reccomdations from algorithms of your choice instead of having to rely on Spotifys algorythms.
Not working for Listenbrainz in any way, just an enthousiastic user that plugs it when he sees fit :)
Ilixtze@lemm.ee 6 days ago
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.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Keep in mind that your descendents probably won’t care about a huge majority of what you leave them. Photos annotated with a date, time, people in them, and an explanation, maybe, but generally my generation hasn’t given a shit about the tonnes of books, music, photos, furniture, knick knacks, and antiquities bequeathed to us. It would be bizarre if our kids didn’t maintain that tradition.
catloaf@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Yup. My parents aren’t even in ill health, let alone dead, but we recently took all the old VHS tapes, including a lot of OTA recordings, and a significant number of DVDs, and dumped them. Recordings of talking with relatives got digitized, same way you’d keep family photos.
I have no expectation that people keep my junk. I’ll pass on a handful of stuff like identifying photos of people and places, but nobody wants or needs the 500 photos of my cat. Even I don’t want that many, but storage is cheap enough that I don’t bother to delete the useless ones.
MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world 6 days ago
You only have 500 photos of your cat? Is your camera broken? Got the cat yesterday?
sbv@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I’m trying to curate a few hundred photos for my kids. I’ve written a couple of bios of relatives. I’d like to record something like a story for them. If they want to trash it, that’s fine, but at least there will be something meaningful for them if they want it.
Assuming it survives the climate wars. 🫠
thejml@lemm.ee 6 days ago
My wife’s parents recently passed. It took months to slog through their stuff and my wife was over it only weeks in. She dumped so much but constantly fights with herself for both taking more than she wanted/needed to and yet less that what she feels she should have. We’ve told our daughter multiple times “our stuff May mean a lot to us, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all to you. If you don’t want it, never feel bad dumping/selling/letting it go.” Out of all the stuff we all collect in life just by living, barely anything has any sentimental value.
On one hand I’ve got a huge collection of photos and albums I’ve taken and collected. I’m trying to clear some out as I go… but I’m not looking forward to that process when my parents go. My dad’s an avid photographer and I know he has a few hundred thousand photos, most of which are near duplicates and he rarely cleans them up.
turmacar@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I think it would be interesting to have some kind of global archive. Even if descendants don’t care “now” has the potential to be the beginning of the best documented era in history. Historians would kill for photographs by random average people from any other time.
A lot of people thought that that’s what the Internet would be, but that’s obviously not the case. And I know the “right to be forgotten” is a thing, and deservedly so, but at some point you’re throwing out the wine with the amphora.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Doesn’t archive.org provide that?
catloaf@lemm.ee 6 days ago
No, we do have that. Social media is a gold mine for analysis, both for modern sociology and for future archaeology.
Goretantath@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Pretty sure theyd love a literal metric shit ton of free and cracked content that fits ontop of their pinky nail.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
My kids aren’t really interested in the movies I like. They actively avoid the music I listen to. I’ve gotten them copies of the books I love and they give up after a few pages. They get bored with the games I played as a kid.
My dad loves Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Bruce Springsteen. I do not. If he wills me his copies, I will keep some out of guilt and then my kids will have to throw them away.
Eggyhead@lemmings.world 6 days ago
Just think. At least you can sell off those nick-nacks. What value is there in digital goods you don’t want?
sbv@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Nobody wanted my grandparents collected crap. Or their photos. Or their books. I tried giving them away. I tried consignment. I tried posting them on Facebook. Most ended up in a landfill.