Japan’s National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start “digital end of life planning” and offered tips on how to do it. The Center’s somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn’t know their usernames or passwords. The resulting “digital legacy” can be unpleasant to resolve, the agency warns, so suggested four steps to simplify ensure our digital legacies aren’t complicated:
- Ensuring family members can unlock your smartphone or computer in case of emergency;
- Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords;
- Consider putting those details in a document intended to be made available when your life ends;
- Use a service that allows you to designate someone to have access to your smartphone and other accounts once your time on Earth ends.
The Center suggests now is the time for it to make this suggestion because it is aware of struggles to discover and resolve ongoing expenses after death. With smartphones ubiquitous, the org fears more people will find themselves unable to resolve their loved ones’ digital affairs – and powerless to stop their credit cards being charged for services the departed cannot consume.
Can you please let us know what password manager does what you said?
So it’s not actually one I would recommend. It’s provided as an employee benefit through my company, and I don’t particularly like my company having any relation to it at all.l and I don’t like the death certificate portion.
I’m moving back to BitWarden, which has a similar feature. It’s Emergency Access, in which your delegated person requests emergency access, there is a wait period where you would be getting emails or whatever notifying you of the access request, and if you don’t respond within the defined time period, access is granted.
So it removes the identification / death certificate portion, which I greatly prefer. My BW vault ties to an email address that I use only for the password manager, not my legal name or Social Security number, so I’m compartmentalizing pieces of identifying information.
You can self host Vaultwarden, which is essentially self managed Bitwarden.
And the feature can be setup fairly easily.
Okay, but if you’re self hosting it, then die, and the hosting has an issue during that time? You’re SOL.
Don’t try to self host things like a dead man switch.
The likelihood that I die, and my loved ones decide to just turn off the server while knowing it’s where the Vaultwarden software lives, before they get access to said Vaultwarden, is very very slim.
Self host whatever you want. Even Deadman switches.
The key is informing your loved ones the requirements for the switch. Just like if they don’t know to request access in other Deadman switches.
And if the hard drive goes out?
Cmon, you can’t tell me you’re comfortable with a 2 week “anything could happen” period where all that information could just disappear forever.
I can definitely tell you I’m comfortable with that.
If family doesn’t know I’m dead in 3 days, they ain’t family.