You saw it? This week, the US government recommended that we all get our homes online for posterity. Now that Facebook has nearly a billion users, quickly followed by Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and other social sites, Washington worries that the Internet could end up with millions of neglected accounts in disuse or death.
So, a few weeks ago, the government added a new section to its list of personal finance recommendations. It’s called creating “a will on social media.”
The update brings an interesting point. What happens to all those passwords and usernames floating around in your head, if you suddenly can’t access them or can no longer use them yourself?
If you’re like most people, you know your Facebook login, YouTube ID, and Twitter or Picassa password by heart. Or you log into them so much that your computer has memorized them and basically logs you in. But what if you have to evacuate your home due to a hurricane or wildfire? Will you bring your PC with you? Will you remember each login if you only have a few minutes to inform your friends and family about your well-being or if you try to find your loved ones with the clock ticking?
Probably not.
It makes a lot more sense (and relieves A LOT of anxiety) to just have all those IDs, passwords, and written instructions in one place. Preferably in a format that you can easily find, edit, and save on paper, on a portable flash drive, or on a password-protected cloud server. That way, you or someone working on your behalf will have the information you need to care for your life on social media.
So if the unthinkable were to happen, let’s say you’re skiing in Gstaad, hitting the mountain too hard, and you’re bedridden in a Swiss hospital for six weeks without access to your computer. Your spouse, parents, or best friend, whoever you designate, will be able to use the list of your social media IDs and passwords to update their friends or raise money for your medical evacuation flight back to the states.
Or even worse, if that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Switzerland ends up being a one-way trip, if you understand me, the designated person will be able to fulfill your wishes to close, commemorate or continue your media accounts on your behalf. , without having to convince online businesses to give you your username and password.
And the other BIG reason to have a social media form like the one we’re talking about is that it’s the perfect way to keep all your IDs and passwords in one place, for your own benefit. Imagine not having to remember them all yourself. Or which account was the one that made you add two numbers and three symbols to your password before they allowed you to sign in.
I know what you’re thinking. That’s exactly why you let your computer memorize logins for you. Well that’s fine until the computer decides to update your internet browser without asking you first and clears your entire password / ID cache, or your computer crashes and takes your login information along with it. With the form, you can even edit your information on the fly, so the next time your social media accounts make you change your password for “your safety,” you can write down the new password and have it. at your fingertips for the next login.
In fact, we’d like people to go a bit further than jot down their Facebook password and Twitter username. What about your online file sharing accounts where you keep your most important documents or the accounts where you keep your photos and videos? You would like your family to have access to those things, right? Who wants their five-year-old’s birthday party photos to be locked away, completely inaccessible to the people they refer to?
Or what about your Netflix account or the membership sites you pay for every month. If you’ve been in Switzerland for a long time without Wi-Fi, your family may just need to be able to access or suspend those accounts, especially if you’re not using them.
All you really need to create your own Social Media Will is a list of all the social media websites you use regularly, along with all their usernames and passwords. Then you will need to write down what you want each account done in your absence. That could be a temporary disability (a broken leg and being stuck in a hospital for a week, for example), an extended absence (a great vacation with no wi-fi in sight), or death. And then you need to name a person who would act on your behalf, to maintain, edit, or delete those accounts for you. You can give the document to your attorney to be part of your will or include the location of the document in your will and let the person acting on your behalf (spouse or executor) know where that document is located.
There is a wonderful article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly called “The Will of Social Media: An Expert Guide to Your Other Digital Life.”
“Gerry Beyer, a national expert in wealth and fiduciary matters, believes that all adults should get their virtual assets in order, sooner rather than later. After all, think about the mess we are potentially leaving behind. From bank passwords to Los eBay and LinkedIn logins, without some kind of long-term plan, our laptops are a jumble of personal and financial data that our heirs can’t find heads or tails of.
“Sorting through the online life of a deceased person in search of important things can be as overwhelming as cleaning a hoarder’s house,” says Beyer. In the old days, you never left your kids without a safe key, so why leave them out of your online possessions? “
We could not agree more.