EP #7: Planning Your Digital Afterlife

Naples Mac Help with Jeff Bohr

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Your estate planning is important. But remember, you have a book a password somewhere and all this that do your loved ones know where that is, because one day you won't be here. And they're gonna have to deal with all this. So basically, in your daily life, over the past decade or two, you've probably visited many websites, you might have some social media accounts with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, you might have email addresses, you know, multiples, and each one of these entities has different processes for resolving the account in the case of a death. So what I want to do is cover some of those steps to make sure you're prepared and when the time comes. So there's no early time to start planning for this, just like there's no early time to start planning your will for your estate and your kids or grandkids or whatever. So what I want to do is cover some of the most popular entities, and then I'll tell you what their policies are, because some of them might surprise you. So
First, Facebook is a big one. So Facebook, basically, you have to go to Security Settings on your Facebook page. And you'll see an option that says legacy contact. So legacy contact is a person, maybe a spouse, or a brother or sister, you know, a sibling, that will be able to manage your account, if you pass away. So let's say I disappear one day, I get hit by a train and I'm gone, my wife can say, if she's the legacy contact, she can provide a final message, you know, Jeff has gone thanks for your wishes or whatever, provide information about the memorial, the funeral. And then she would also be able to download all my posts and videos. So the difference is Facebook doesn't allow them to log in or delete your account. But they can give those final messages to your friends and family so that you know what happened. Okay, so Facebook, really the accounts just kind of hang on there forever. But you can give that final goodbye on behalf of your loved one if they make you a legacy contact. But then, basically, your Facebook account just freezes.
So that's Facebook's policy. Okay? Now, Google is another big entity. So you might sign into Google, it's always good to use Google anonymously. But if you do have a Gmail account, basically, Google you can specify in settings and advanced what's called a timeout period. So what that saying is that if you haven't logged in, in a certain amount of time, six months or a year, Google may send you an email and text that says, Hey, are you still with us, you know, because you haven't logged in in a while. And then if you can also set up trusted contacts in Google. So there's something does happen to you, they can, if you do that in advance, they can access your Google account and close it. So anybody that you give access to your Google account, as far as a trusted contact, they call it, they're able to shut down your Google account after you pass. Okay, so that's a little different from Facebook, Facebook, just kind of freezes it, and it's there forever. But Google, let your contact, remove it. So then you can get rid of all your Google data.
Charlie McDermott
And when you when you say the Facebook freezes that account that page, does that mean, your legacy person couldn't post anymore or or
Jeff Bohr
the legacy person could always post, okay, but it's kind of a third party thing because they don't actually log into your account. They just have access to the page where they can still post things after you're gone. Okay? They cannot do anything except download prior posts, they cannot edit them, they cannot remove them. So basically, if you pass on December 31, and last thing you did was a New Year's Eve party and you put some pictures up those will be there indefinitely, forever. And then when you You get the, when someone passes, they will, the