Every day, I put more of my life online and less of my life is offline. I don’t keep a diary and I don’t have physical photos or video of my memories. Everything is stored on hard drives and on servers located across the world. When I die, the data I’ve created will be my legacy and this is why an Internet Will is important.
Laura has a copy of this will and I will be sending a copy to my father as well. In the event of my death, they will open the envelope to reveal a thumb drive. This drive has a partition readable by Windows & Mac and password protected with a code that only my family knows. I’d like to share the contents of this drive.
- A video that needs to be uploaded to YouTube or the popular video site of the time.
- A few photos to be used in my memorial (if I have one)
- A letter announcing my death with my final goodbyes
- Password to my blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google and other accounts to send my last “updates” of my death
- Bank account & financial logins
- Passwords to nearly every single website. I generate this 25 page PDF once a month that contains passwords to every site I’m a member of. I try to keep this as up to date as possible.
- A document that says which of my electronics goes to which family member.
The only things I own in life are my bicycle, clothing, kitchen utensils and my firearms. The rest of my belongings require electricity. I have computer, hard drives, speakers, monitors, phones & more that are all considered “electronics” and I have all of these made out to someone in the event that I die. For example, my father gets my laptop and Laura gets my 30″ Monitor and RAID Array of LaCie Drives.
I’m surprised that more people don’t do this. On average, I have friends spend 4 hours a day online. I spend about 10 hours a day physically in front of a computer so it makes sense that all of my memories and data I’ve generated online mean something to me even after death. I don’t want my Flickr album, Facebook status or blog to sit dormant after my death. It’s appropriate to have one last update, post or upload to have a bit of closure and I leave it to my family to carry out this act.
If you have a Twitter profile or Flickr account, you already should have one of these Internet Wills and I hope one day there’s a service that lets me put all of this into an account (passwords, last blog post and video) so when I do die, a family member can click one button and announce my death. To those of you reading this that are confused and surprised, you’re probably in a different generation or you haven’t embraced “The Matrix” Internet lifestyle that I have.
if you disagree keep your comments to yourself.
I so need this