Where There's a Will, There's Still no Ebay; or Why I Love the Market, Part Whatever

This is a great article on CNN.com today about companies that will take care of your "digital assets" after you die.  You pay them a fairly small fee and they keep track of all your email ids/passwords, bank accounts, etc. so that your loved ones can have access to them if you die without leaving all that information behind.  They promise to store them securely of course.  An excerpt:

Jeremy Toeman, founder of the site Legacy Locker, recognized that when he was on a plane and wondered what would happen to his online life if it crashed. While his will leaves everything to his wife, including all of his digital assets, Toeman realized how difficult it would be for her to access his accounts.

"My GoDaddy account would belong to her, but it doesn't solve the practical reality of how she would get access to it," he said. He experienced a similar scenario after his grandmother died, and he tried to get the password for her e-mail account -- only to give up because of the hassle.

So Toeman built his company to change all that. Legacy Locker allows users to set up a kind of online will, with beneficiaries that would receive the customer's account information and passwords after they die.

"We know it's a hard thing to think about -- to get people to face mortality. We know it's kind of morbid, but for those who live their entire lives online, it's also very real."

A Legacy Locker account costs $29.99 a year. Users can set up their accounts at www.legacylocker.com to specify who gets access to their posthumous online information, along with "legacy letters," or messages, that can be sent to loved ones.

If someone contacts Legacy Locker to report a client's death, the service will send the customer four e-mails in 48 hours. If there's no response, Legacy Locker will then contact the people the client listed as verifiers in the event of his or her death. Even then, the service would not release digital assets without examining a copy of the customer's death certificate, Toeman said.

It's also a great example of entrepreneurship in action.   Markets give us new technologies that give us new problems we didn't have before, which are then, in turn, solved by market participants, creating new problems, etc..  This is how markets work:  solving one set of problems only opens up new opportunities to solve new ones.  We can never exhaust the possibilities of growth and there will always be work for humans to do.

Comments

[Robert S. Porter]

I'll agree that it's an "example of entrepreneurship in action". However, I'd argue it's solving a problem that doesn't exist.

For nearly every part of my online existance I wouldn't want my family to have access to it.

There was a case a while back about a wife or mother who was trying to force Yahoo to give her the password to their deceased husband/son. AFAIK Yahoo didn't, to their credit, relent and the account remained locked. I suppose this service would have prevented that problem.

However, I think that a piece of paper and a safety deposit box would be a cheaper option for people who don't value their privacy in the afterlife.

[Erick]

Thanks for the article!

In a normal economic environment, I can count on my fingers the number of people who will pay $30/year to store their passwords.

I think this is more likely an example of how monetary expansion distorts production and capital allocation.

[Mario Rizzo]

With new firms I always wonder whether they'll be in existence when the time comes. Not to be morbid but: A friend of my mother's decided to prepay her own funeral expenses. But then the funeral home went out of business before she died. Now she can't get her money back. So there with your Market.

[Current]

My Great-Grandfather had a partial solution to that one. He made his own tombstone. He just omitted the death date, he kept it in his garden shed. Since he was a Yorkshireman this wasn't seen as odd.

[Larry Miller]

I guess that for the person who this would appeal to would be the kind who would sign up and forget about it with a false sense of security.

As accounts, email, bank, credit card, etc. come and go, maintaining usable records with this company may well be even more cumbersome than writing them down. So unless the person assumes room temperature shortly after signing up for the program, the stored data may be outdated.

[supra shoes]

A burnt child dreads the fire.

[Air Jordans]

So funny, I think.*