For many of us, the internet is quickly becoming a comprehensive digital archive of our lives, housing our photo albums, documents, correspondence, and video clips. Unfortunately, when someone passes away, the mechanisms for transferring this information to family members are archaic, requiring intervention from lawyers and in some some cases made impossible by a web site’s Terms of Service.
Legacy Locker is a new company looking to make the transfer of these digital treasures as easy on surviving friends and family as possible. The site allows users to input their login credentials to the web services they access, which are then distributed to family members or friends in the event of their death. Users can select which account information will be distributed to whom (for example, you could send your PayPal credentials to your spouse, and your Zoho account to coworkers). Legacy Locker is making its initial debut today, and the service itself will go live in the next few weeks.
Legacy Locker is primarily geared towards the over 12 millions American households who have created wills either with the help of professionals or using software (the company believes it will be most appealing to people who are proactively interested in protecting and preserving their assets). The service will offer a free demo to test out the interface, and will cost $30/year or $300/lifetime. In the event of a death, the site allows a user’s attorney or friends to alert the site to their passing, with a number of checks and balances in place to ensure there are no false notifications.
Legacy Locker seems like a good idea for things like photo albums, though I question how many people would be eager to share their Email accounts or social network profiles. In any case, the real issue with Legacy Locker (and other ‘online wills’) is that they are only useful if the company exists for many years, which is hardly a given for most startups. That said, there’s a definite need for a way to transfer digital information with more finesse than a court order, and Legacy Locker may just be the answer.
For another death-related service, check out MyWonderfulLife, which allows users to plan their own funeral.
Wow. Brilliant.
I hope I don’t have to use this service for at least another 70 years… but once this little niche flushes through the evolution, competition and consolidation cycles, I believe services like this will be as important as the services they aim to serve: FB, PayPal, flikr, et al.
There are also some easy jokes here…. but I’ll leave those for the following posters.
This is a timely offering. The Triangle SxSW Meetup last night featured a talk around this topic
http://www.love...il-after-i-die/
It was a very lively (npi) discussion.
Is this what AOL did with X drive when they found out they couldn’t get 5 million for it?
Sun’s 16 core chip is going to come out soon.
http://www.itwo...-year-exec-says
Lemme just scratch that one off my big list of ‘great ideas’ – I knew it was only a matter of time.
Will be interesting to see how this does for them.
Best of luck!
People give social networks their email accounts and allow those sites to spam all their friends emails about joining up. I don’t see how different this is… well maybe a little different…
Dear X,
Sign up to Legacy Locker to see what your friend has left you in the digital world after hes dead and buried 6 feet under(maybe some pics of him and your girlfriend? who knows!). Just click on the following link to join and find out…..
done many times before, it is everywhere if you know how to google.
Great idea! What kind of funding did they get?
It’s definitely important to leave this information for your next of kin. There are so many documents, files, email clients, social networking sites, login information for someone to have to access! One of the beauties of GoEverywhere is that a user can store their important documents, files, and all of their username/passwords under one login ID on their online personal webtop. This way it’s accessible from anywhere. This may be a another option – just leave your GoEverywhere username/password in your will.
Having recently celebrated the arrival of my firstborn child, my own mortality has given me greater pause for these types of issues. I think it worthwhile, as long as you have a contingency plan on that.
Hey Jason,
I am an aspiring 24 year old real estate agent. Most of my “assets” are in fact digital. Web domains, Blogs, Client Contact Lists, International Realtor Referral Databases, Pictures, Legal Documents, Videos, etc. This service is a great investment in the event that an unexpected occurrence were to happen. Thanks for the great resource.
-Brendan
Programming error causes thousands of highly embarrassing “I’m not really your father” Legacy Letters to be sent before customers expire in 3…2…1…
This is really cool. I do have a lot of digital assets and I’d want people to have access to them, particularly pictures and videos of my kid. I’d pay for this, for sure.
This is a Brilliant Idea. I’ll definitely use this service.
this is SO already done by so many companies…..
Did you even do any research before posting this article? This is nothing new – already 3-4 companies doing exactly this, yet this reads like something innovative. You ought to focus more on tellign companies to stop re-inventing the wheel and wasting resources for stuff that already exists. Bad journalism. P.S. I see absolutely no way they make any guarantee they will keep this stuff by the time you’re dead.
PPS all the comments sound as though they are coming from employees or friends of employees or their wives
Great idea but other companies are steps a head of this one, one for example http://www.mypeaceofmind.info from what I understand they will have the patent on a similar idea.
how can you patent something like this? Will & testaments (on and offline) and safe deposit boxes (again on and off) have been around since.. well.. forever..
its not the wills that are being patented it is the business method on how they are stored online
This is a bit similar to what we’re doing with Story of My Life. And we have a mechanism to ensure that the “legacy” part keeps its promise
– the separate entity the Foundation as an insurance policy.
Sorry Jason, since you didn’t mention us I have to jump at the chance!
I didn’t see anything about photos, videos, mb of storage on there web page. It seems like just a new spin on the password vault or did I miss something on there site? Next up, security then hosted copyrighted content/file sharing if you can even put files on there.
Nice article! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com
Love it!
@businessethos
VitalLock is another in this ‘Digital Estate’ space http://VitalLock.com
Founded by a lawyer in NH (beta tests ongoing) …
http://www.legosy.com
The key point here that was brought up by the author was the longevity issue. Sort of like getting life insurance from a firm that just opened up last week. But there is no way to avoid this paradox, some firm has to come out on top and establish itself eventually. I verify new products/services with the digital security site justaskgemalto.