Make a List of Your Internet Baggage
A low-tech approach to one narrow of slice of "estate planning"
I wound up doing traumatic quantities of digital and physical cleanup in my life the last couple of years, and this got me thinking that there is a mundane online access problem sneaking up on most of us. Just about everyone uses computers now whether we want to or not, and therefore we accumulate accounts on the internet. Besides banks and similarly boring stuff, there is a dizzying number of (forgotten and unused?) streaming content services. If you’re even halfway into the modern digital society, then you likely have accounts in many places, often with different logins, and (ideally) different passwords. For many people, it's hardly a big deal if these accounts become orphaned, so to speak. If you drop off the edge of the digital world, it just won't matter - your IG content does not need to be preserved and forwarded to the Library of Congress no matter how good your lunch pictures are.
Consider what happens if you happen to get Hit By a Bus and you are uh, "incapacitated". (I have never understood why this particular euphemism is the one that we always use in software development biz — why not “eaten by a tiger” or “squished by a piano falling from a building”? — if we’re going to entertain relatively low-probability causes of catastrophe, we should have more fun with it.)
Whether you meet your end via tiger, piano, or bus, the recommendation is the same: prepare a list of accounts, account numbers, screen-names, etc. and stash it somewhere sensible. That is, not on a sticky note on your main computer monitor. Capturing and stashing this information should be a typical social convention like setting up “advance directive” instructions with your family. With a very cursory internet search, I located at least one service that could perform an escrow-like function to stash this kind of sensitive information, but this approach is overkill for most people. There is also the old-school path featuring attorneys and safe deposit boxes, but the best implementation is the simple one. I recommend a technology that is low-power, write-once, readable in daylight, and not susceptible to magnetic fields or EMP events: you guessed it, a piece of paper.
When I created my “in case of emergency” list, I wrote down website addresses, a little description, account login information, account numbers, etc. I then took that piece of paper and "put it away" in my house's equivalent of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was surprised by the list length, and took the opportunity to ditch a couple of unused services. I suspect forgotten auto-billed subscriptions represent the only reliable revenue stream on the internet (not counting p0rn and cat videos, naturally). Have you ever received an email from a provider saying “hey, thanks for your continued automatic billing! Do you realize that you haven’t used any of our services lately? Click here to cancel!” Me neither, imagine that.
Is it worth the risk of having the keys to your online life on a piece of paper? For me, the answer is an easy "yes". I am a putative adult with a mortgage, bank accounts, 401k, savings, etc. and it's been my job over the years to manage those kinds of things in our family. (Wife was head of the Child Production, Psychology, and Management Department, and I was Operations, Transportation, HVAC, and IT). I do not envy whoever has to reverse-engineer all the subscriptions and paperless billing setups I've created over the years for my own convenience. Estate-planning of any sort is always a little weird, but this bit of planning is a relatively simple way to make life easier for my family if/when I am too slow to dodge the piano, shall we say. The big companies (e.g., Google, Yahoo) have protocols to authorize some other-person to gain access to an account but this process necessarily requires a lot of jumping through proof-of-identity hoops. It is easier to just dig the piece of paper out the “random important documents” folder kept in a plastic file box that dreams of becoming a file cabinet one day.
Maybe most people already do this and don’t talk about it, in which case, I’m happy to be wrong and there are lots of ways to update my world view on the Substack platform. If this idea is new to you, then it’s because it’s not a social convention like “earthquake kits”. I have lived a large part of my life in California, and it’s totally normal to have a few of these hanging around. Ideally these kits get stashed in different parts of the house and contain things like an emergency blanket, drinking water, maybe some military-style food blocks i.e., typical zombie-apocalypse/collapse-of-civilization kinds of things. My personal earthquake/go bag contains a Powerbar from 1994, a candle, a box of wood matches, a thumb drive containing all the back issues of “Popular Preppers” magazine, and several wee plastic bottles of tequila. Earthquake kits are just a typical social convention here, and there are equivalencies all over the country depending on what your local catastrophe profile looks like (tornado, hurricane, zombies). You hope you never have to use it, but it's a good practice. In that spirit, make a list of accounts, stash it somewhere, and make sure it's in a place that's well-known to your people.
If you’re not comfortable recording your login and password information on a piece of paper, good for you! This is sensitive stuff. The industry has worked very hard to get people to quit reusing passwords, and set up two-factor authentication for critical accounts like your primary personal email account. Thus the very existence of a "bread crumbs" document (even without passwords) should be a bit terrifying from a security hygiene perspective. Access to this piece of paper would be an identity thief’s dream, so handle it thoughtfully.
Here's a summary from Captain Obvious:
DON'T put your passwords into an electronic document labeled "bank-passwords.txt" on Dropbox with public access
DO just use a piece of paper
DON'T put the piece of paper anywhere near a computer
DO tell someone where you stashed the thing and what it's for
YMMV as they used to say in olden times (”your mileage may vary” -- look it up, kids) because maybe you don’t have lots of accounts, maybe no kids, business partners or significant other, etc. so of course this guidance is far from universal. Indeed you might be in a situation where key people in your circle already know your email password and phone unlock code, or you've managed to set up (for example) your spouse as a co-admin on all your accounts. If that's the case, it's helpful because demonstrating ownership of an email account and a phone is typically sufficient to reset passwords as needed. Passwords change for various reasons, so the main proposition is not to create a comprehensive document of passwords. Rather the most useful artifact would look more like an inventory containing enough signposts to simplify the lives of those who inherit the maintenance of a modern online life.