Digital Asset Toolbox | Mylennium

Digital Asset Toolbox

Digital Asset Toolbox

Mylennium's Digital Asset Toolbox provides thoughts, insight, methods, and suggestions to help with the management of digital assets during your lifetime and as an aid to a digital executor as they prepare to identify, protect, and transfer digital property and digital assets under the direction of the estate executor.

Topics to be covered are listed below along with a brief description of the category and the type of information to be provided.

A complete digital asset inventory is the foundation for any digital estate plan. Everyone must create and maintain a digital asset inventory that lists the devices they own, as well as the softare applications and online services they use. The inventory should include instructions on what should be done with each asset at the owner's death or incapacity such as transfer, close, memorialize (social media), delete, or erase.

Password manager software provides several important benefits:

  • Securely store passwords for devices, applications, and online services, in additions to keys used to encrypt files or control access to devices and networks
  • Make it easy to update passwords when they change
  • Provide access to passwords across all digital devices
  • Generate secure passwords of varying complexity
  • Check password strength and uniqueness

 

All online services that require you to signup for an account require your consent to their Terms of Service agreement as a condition of using their site. Mylennium offers a Domain Information Resources database that provides digital estate related information about many popular services, including important restrictions found in the service's Terms of Service agreement, links to important service information including the current Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Account Closure instructions, site category, and contact information where available.

Preserving assets created on multiple devices, different operating systems, and online services requires a workflow that supports fiduciary access to assets after the owner's death. No single asset workflow works for everyone.
There is no shortage of choices for online digital storage to hold an estate owner's digital assets. We offer several posts descibing some of the most popular choices and how a digital executor can use each one to gather a decedent's files and control family member access.
How do you go about selecting a digital executor that you name in your estate plan to oversee the disposition of your digital assets after your passing? We provide some suggestions on important attributes and skills that any digital executor should possess in our article A Day in the Life of a Digital Executor: Introduction.
A digital executor likely has two classes of digital assets to settle for any given estate - tangible digital property and intangible digital assets. While tangible digital property is property covered by a will or trust and usually easily located, many intangible digital assets are stored on third party equipment and under the restrictions imposed by Terms of Service agreements. It's important to understand which digital assets have restrictions that could impede their transfer to heirs.
Data encryption can make it difficult or even impossible to recover important files created by an estate owner. If you are a digital executor faced with gathering a decedent's digital assets, these posts will help you understand the obstacles you're up against when faced with encrypted data.
It can be a big challenge to track down all of the documents on another person's laptop or desktop computer. File management software can easily locate files of interest, such as photos and documents, by searching across a multi-terabyte drive in very little time.
Domain names are ubiquitous on the Web, so much so that we take them for granted and overlook their potential monetary value. We provide background into the workings of domain names, how they are registered, and how to determine if a decedent may hold valuable registered domain names.
Mylennium provides a host of services to help an individual or an estate or digital executor manage digital assets. Here we provide some suggested sites in the digital legacy space to help in areas not presently serviced by Mylennium.
All of the computing devices owned by an individual are tangible property that are part of the decedent's estate. These devices most certainly store digital assets that hold emotional and potentially monetary value. If you're an estate or digital executor and you are unable to access a device due to password protection or encryption, what are your options? We provide suggestions on dealing with the most common obstacles in this article.