14 DAY TRIAL // More and more people are moving parts of their lives online. Photos, music, notes and, well, memories live on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and so on. So more and more people are taking steps to make sure that everything doesn't get lost once they pass away and are leaving their passwords in wills.
According to a study in the UK, one in 10 people leave this type of info to their loved ones in wills.
While it may seem like a small number, it's surprising that so many people are thinking about this, nobody likes to think about their own death and, if they do, their Facebook password is probably not their first concern.
It makes sense though, not many services take into account this simple fact of life, people die.
Facebook has only recently started thinking about this and ways to deal with it, but that's a site with 800 million users and even it doesn't have a very well thought out plan.
Statistics may be harsh, but when we're talking about 800 million people, there are going to be a lot of them that pass away, at a regular rate, 480,000 this year alone, according to a study. Many times, the profiles become shrines of sorts, but this is somewhat ad hoc.
After the unfortunate event, family members and friends are left with no way of accessing profiles and accounts since they rarely know the passwords.
And there are few steps that can be taken to retrieve an account or take ownership of it. Password recovery systems are linked to email accounts, which have their own passwords, of course.
In some lucky circumstances, they may be able to recover an account via a phone number which is sometimes used as a backup.
Of course, there are times when there's more at stake than profiles or photos, more and more people have invested a lot of money in music or films that may be in the cloud or protected by DRM.