Digital legacy: Here's how you can plan what happens to it after you die

Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving, and they include virtual currencies, behavioral tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.

- Bjorn Nansen

Imagine you are planning the funeral music for a loved one who has died. You can't remember their favourite song, so you try to log in to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual "wrapped" analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories and identity.

We tend to think about inheritance in physical terms: money, property, personal belongings. But the vast volume of digital stuff we accumulate in life and leave behind in death is now just as important — and this "digital legacy" is probably more meaningful.

Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving. They include now-familiar items such as social media and banking accounts, along with our stored photos, videos and messages. But they also encompass virtual currencies, behavioral tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.

This digital data is fundamental not only to our online identities in life, but also to our inheritance in death.

So how can we properly plan for what happens to it?

A WINDOW INTO OUR LIVES Digital legacy is commonly classified into two categories: digital assets and digital presence. Digital assets include items with economic value. For example, domain names, financial accounts, monetised social media, online businesses, virtual currencies, digital goods and personal digital intellectual property. Access to these is spread across platforms, hidden behind passwords or restricted by privacy laws.

Digital presence includes content with no monetary value. However, it may have great personal significance. For example, our photos and videos, social media profiles, e-mail or chat threads, and other content archived in cloud or platform services.