Keep a list of websites with your will?

By Julie Starr | Published: February 3, 2009

Following on from earlier conversations about what happens to our online lives when we die, I spoke to a Public Trust adviser recently about the issue.

Graveyard Rose
The issue being: Who’s going to trawl around the web cancelling your email addresses, subscriptions and social media accounts when you die?

And who’s going to decide whether and when to pull the plug on your websites?

The adviser I spoke to (informally, not as a source for a story) wasn’t aware of any specific advice but suggested making a list of your email addresses, websites, logins and passwords and giving it to your lawyer, Public Trust adviser or whoever it is that holds your will.

The list would go in a vault with your will, she said, and wouldn’t be touched until you died or decided to update it.

Your lawyer or executor could then fire off an email to all the websites you’re connected to letting them know of your demise, and carry out any instructions you have about your websites.

Incidentally, the Public Trust charges NZ$115 an hour for this kind of work, lawyers considerably more. So I guess you’d want to give them a fairly well-documented list.

Food for thought anyway.


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  • http://www.snice.co.nz SNICE

    Its good to know that you can do that, but what a pain if you change your passwords regularly (like your supposed to)

    I think there is a market for a website that has a sort of deadman switch involved. i.e. you give it all your passwords, or just one to say your email which has everything stored in a google docs document or something, with instructions. And if you don’t log into this site for a certain period, it trys contacting you. After so many failed attempts at contact it then sends the password to a person of your choosing.

    I could give passwords to my family, but they wouldn’t know what to do, i’d have to have a big instruction sheet. The other option is have everything on a USB stick and have that with your will.

    Just my opinion on it.

  • http://evolvingnewsroom.co.nz Julie Starr

    Know what you mean about it being a pain changing passwords often and keeping track of them. Interesting idea about a site with a deadman switch – but would you trust such a site?

  • http://www.snice.co.nz SNICE

    That’s the thing, trust. I don’t know if people would, yet they trust email accounts with all their emails and other details. So I guess it would be somewhat similar.

    Only reason I have thought about this, is that a friend of mine died, and i’m not even sure what happened to her account on the internet, I don’t think anyone got any passwords. And if something happened to me tomorrow, I guess it would appear if I had just disappeared of the net, and stopped updating stuff.

  • http://evolvingnewsroom.co.nz Julie Starr

    Sorry to hear about your friend, Snice.
    Maybe the thing about leaving a list of your web accounts with an adviser is that they wouldn’t have to deal with passwords at all – just write a letter to the account providers saying you’re gone and please close the account?

  • http://www.snice.co.nz SNICE

    Yeah that is a good point, but what about people you know on the internet? I know that if my accounts just suddenly got closed with no explanation, some people on the net I know would be like WTF?

    Anyways, I could go on about this for ages, but I better get some sleep, big day at work tomorrow.

  • http://daveleejblog.com Dave Lee

    This is something that makes me wonder, too. I did a piece about it for the Guardian… http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/07/socialnetworking.myspace

    Seems of all the soc-networks, only LiveJournal had something in place to deal with user death.

  • http://evolvingnewsroom.co.nz Julie Starr

    Yes I saw your piece and linked to it a while back. Do these sites need to ask us what we want to happen to our account when we die and maybe give us a couple of options? Like, would you like your account deleted immediately, after a month, a year? Would you like us to do nothing until we hear from your lawyer? Would you like us to post a message on your site letting people know, if so, what message?