New services promise online life after death

Your husband, an avid gamer and techie, dies of a heart attack, leaving his vast online life ­-- one you don't know much about ­-- in limbo.

His accounts, to which you don't know the passwords, go idle. His e-mails go unanswered, his online multiplayer games go on without him and bidders on his eBay items don't know why they can't get an answer from the seller.

Web site domains that he has purchased, some of which are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,­ will expire, and you may never know.

It's a scenario that's becoming more likely as we spend more of our lives online. And it's raising more questions about what happens to our online lives after we log off for the final time.

The answer, until recently, was nothing.

Jeremy Toeman, founder of the site Legacy Locker, recognized that when he was on a plane and wondered what would happen to his online life if it crashed. While his will leaves everything to his wife, including all of his digital assets, Toeman realized how difficult it would be for her to access his accounts.

So Toeman built his company to change all that. Legacy Locker allows users to set up a kind of online will, with beneficiaries that would receive the customer's account information and passwords after they die.

"We know it's a hard thing to think about -- to get people to face mortality. We know it's kind of morbid, but for those who live their entire lives online, it's also very real."

A Legacy Locker account costs $29.99 a year. Users can set up their accounts to specify who gets access to their posthumous online information, along with "legacy letters," or messages, that can be sent to loved ones.

Source


Now thats one heck of an idea.

I never thought of what would happen to my "online" life, once I'm gone. I guess one wouldn't need to use this service though, could just have the passwords and info left in their "living will".

Still a neat concept though.

I'm not 100% sure but if I'm dying I think my online life is the last thing I'd worry about, except maybe online banking.

Why pay someone to do that? I could write them down in a book for in case I died.