Digital legacy

A digital legacy is an aspect of the wealth of an individual or company that may be passed upon death to a nominated person, often legalised in the form of a digital will. Digital legacies consist partly of digital or virtual assets in the form of photographs, blogs, information, data and value that comprise the often overlooked worth of online activities and storage, and also assets with a financial or monetary worth.
Assets
The list of digital assets is growing with every visit to The Internet, and this potential worth is often overlooked when considering the transfer of assets upon death. The assets may be considered to have financial value, or personal, historical and family worth.
The list of potential assets includes the ownership and transfer of blogs and websites, social networking pages, gaming, gambling sites and email accounts.
The rise of the phenomenon of social networking especially amongst the over 50’s is creating millions of personal archives whose emotional and historical values are of immense worth to the individual, and comprise an increasing aspect of digital legacy.
The individual worth of these assets might be relatively small, but collectively many people have considerable worth held online as a result of years of internet activity.
Largely ignored, and generally forgotten, digital legacy is an aspect of an individuals wealth that the larger internet companies are unable to address, as they have no system whereby automatic notification of a user’s death is activated, to either release assets, or close accounts.
Considered unimportant until recently in comparison with traditional or physical assets, the rise of digital assets and the need to consider a digital legacy is rapidly growing, as individuals increase their amount of digital assets.
As the volume of content purchased and delivered online increases, the need for digital legacy is increasing in direct relationship to the growing amount of digital assets.
The assets need not be related to value or worth, but may be predominantly of a personal and emotional nature, and therefore the legacy may require editing, cleansing and refining to make the digital footprint of a more suitable nature - 'leaving the world a better trace'.
The Future
Digital Legacy has been described as ‘the birth of a new industry' (Your Digital Afterlife, Carroll & Romano, 2011), as new companies are being created to hold secure encrypted access to digital assets, to be released upon the proof of a users death.
An average individual is estimated to create 88 gigabytes of digital information over a lifetime, adding 3.3 megabytes daily, and much of this data holds potential value, both in terms of data mining, and also the dynamic manner of digital value, recognising the possibility that digital data that holds no value today may be of great value in the future.

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