‘Kodak moments’ may have gone the way of the dinosaur, but the value in capturing a special moment lives on.
Thanks to the ubiquity of modern-day smartphones and the power of cloud storage, we can have direct access to our media, both physically and digitally, virtually anytime and anywhere.
But preserving our digital legacy is often overlooked, and yet it’s an essential part of life, especially when it comes to the important documents we might also have saved there. This could include policy documents, account details and other financial information.
After you die, if you’ve not passed on the accounts, usernames and passwords, they’ll be inaccessible to anyone else, or even deleted.
So in this post we’re going to look at how you can protect the ‘online you’ so that if anything happens, your digital legacy is kept safe.
Our digital assets are integral to our life, work, and social presence. They're the DNA of our life in the technological world, dictating how we connect and interact with people far and wide.
Digital assets can be anything from our emails, photos, and financial information, or even our personal accounts for various services. When you think about it, we store a vast amount of valuable information about ourselves online, such as our bank accounts, investment portfolios, and notes from loved ones. Even our opinions expressed on social media networks and public forums count as our ‘digital DNA’.
This digital heritage is something we should treasure and protect.
For one thing, it serves as a record of our achievements, successes, and experiences, allowing us to look back on our lives in retrospect.
On a slightly more negative note, this information could also be used against us by fraudsters trying to exploit our personal data in the wrong ways, or by a company that utilises your data for their own benefit.
Protecting your digital legacy is therefore important as it ensures whatever you have shared is kept only in the way you intended and is not misinterpreted.
Protecting your digital assets begins with having an in-depth understanding of what your digital legacy is, and how you can plan for its security and protection.
Think of your digital legacy as the material and memories you leave behind via the digital devices, platforms, and networks you use for yourself and for your family. For example, if you’ve ever used the internet and created profiles, accounts or stored data, those are all part of your digital legacy.
These decisions deserve planning and attention, but once you’ve been through the process, you might feel a weight lifted. It can also ease the emotional burden for loved ones – a clear plan for your social media accounts, for example, will mean avoiding upsetting notifications popping up for your friends and family (such as Facebook reminders about birthdays or anniversaries).
In conclusion, digital legacies are a big part of our lives, whether we like it or not. It’s our responsibility to ensure that our digital assets remain safe and secure, so that when our time comes, our legacy can live on in the digital world the same way it did in the physical world.
Doing so will allow us to live on in our thoughts, experiences, and advice, even after we’re gone, and give our families and future generations memories of us they can treasure.
You can book an online meeting with one of our advisers at your convenience here.
