Part 1 – Gaining Access To Digital Assets Can Be Harder Than You Think
March 4, 2016
The stories are starting to become more frequent and familiar. They generally involve grieving families trying to access their deceased loved one’s online accounts, social media, or even devices such as iPhones and iPads. Those of us who are online are likely to amass a great deal of data, such as messages, emails, voice mails, photos, passwords, music, and videos on our devices and in the cloud, which can become painfully out of the reach of our loved ones after our lifetimes. It can be difficult to even obtain a password to access an iPhone or iPad of a deceased loved one without a court order. Add on top of this the frustration of each online service provider instituting it’s own policy for providing access to our loved ones’ accounts, you can easily see that this is a situation we would want to avoid.
See the links below for recent examples:
Widow Needed A Court Order to Access iPad
A Legal Showdown With Apple To Access iPhone Photos
Is there anything you can do to plan for allowing your family access to your online life, if that is your wish? Of course there is. I will talk about that in Part 2 of this post.