If you’re like the average person, you have upward of 100 online passwords, and if you don’t remember to catalog them and your wishes for the accounts they protect before you die, some email and social accounts could get lost to the ether. Same goes for your personal website, which is beholden to a domain name that you can only register for 10 years at a time, at most.
In our fourth HellFireside Chat, journalists Mike De Socio and Ernie Smith joined us to dig into their GraveSite reporting and take your questions. Check out the recording to learn who should hold your passwords, what a digital executor does, why a will alone might not get your family into your email, and how to keep your corner of the internet from going dark.
Actions you can take
Write down the 5-10 highest priority digital accounts you want handled after your death; add passwords and instructions later.
Consider financial accounts, email, and anything that could affect your reputation, such as social media.
If you run a website, document its domain registrar, hosting, image storage, and other services it depends on.
Choose a trusted digital executor and talk with them about the role before they need to act.
Keep an offline backup of essential account information even if you use a digital vault.
If you're handling a loved one's estate, defer non-urgent digital cleanup for a couple of weeks when possible, then tackle those essential accounts first.
Episode chapters
00:00 Meet the guests and the digital-afterlife question
03:34 Start with 10 accounts, not 120 passwords
05:01 Why domains cannot simply last forever
08:57 What families can access on social media
10:24 Why digital vaults need an offline backup
14:43 How to choose and prepare a digital executor
17:52 How to make conversations about death less overwhelming
20:23 A first-step checklist for digital affairs
23:34 What should be preserved, memorialized, or deleted?
25:28 How to help a personal website outlive its owner
28:54 Archives, universities, and the Internet Archive
30:10 What stories about loved ones belong online?
33:30 The lost histories of GeoCities and Yahoo Groups
35:41 A proposal to preserve websites for 50 years
39:49 Lightning round: camera rolls, blogs, and group chats
47:30 Could a local AI preserve someone’s digital archive?
50:50 Where to find the guests’ work
51:28 The five-minute action to do today: write down your 10 accounts