If you’ve heard us talk about digital estate planning before, we always end the talk with an easy way out. It goes something like this. “If you do nothing else, make sure you inventory your most important digital accounts, record your user names and passwords, and then have a conversation with a trusted friend of loved one and tell them how to find it.” This is our way of helping you avoid benign neglect and actually do something today to handle your digital estate planning. In short, we know it’s a lot of work and we’re trying to make it easier for you to get started.

On the other side of things, we continually praise digital estate planning services that 1. make it easier for users to complete the process and 2. offer value during life and not just after death. In that spirit, here’s an idea to make planning a bit easier.

If you’re comfortable with saving your passwords in your Web browser, you can use various utilities to export the list of passwords to a spreadsheet. You can use that as a basis for your digital asset inventory or you might be able to upload the list to a digital estate planning service of your choice. You’ll still need to express your wishes for each account and make sure that your executor is notified about the inventory, but this will help you get started.

What you should do:

1. As you use the Web, save your passwords. Many Web browsers offer a simple way to do so. Here’s an example of the message you’ll see in Firefox.

Remember password dialog in Firefox

2. After about a week of saving passwords you’ll probably have a list of the online accounts you use most frequently. You can preview the list in Firefox by clicking Preferences > Security > Saved Passwords (or Options > Security if you use Windows). You’ll want to check and make sure you have your important accounts listed.

3. Export your passwords. In Firefox you can use the Password Exporter add-on to create a CSV file of your passwords. This file can be opened in almost every spreadsheet application, like Excel.

4. Copy this information into your digital asset inventory (we have templates: Excel, Google Docs) or you can look into importing the information into your digital estate planning service. If you use DataInherit, they have instructions for doing so here.

5. Include your wishes in your inventory or in your digital estate planning service. Repeat this process from time to time to capture new accounts or those you use less frequently.

If you a browser other than Firefox, here’s how you can find your passwords:

Safari or Chrome for Mac: Go to the Applications folder > Utilities and open Keychain Access. Choose Passwords to see a list of saved passwords from your browser.

Chrome for Windows: Go to the Tools menu > Options > Minor Tweaks tab. In the Passwords section, click the Show saved passwords button.

Internet Explorer for Windows: In Internet Explorer, there are no free or built in password recovery features. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but there is Passcape Internet Explorer Password Recovery.

Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death is the panel I’ve proposed for SXSW 2012. In short we’ll talk about how we can archive our digital content so that it can be preserved and experienced in the future. I’ve asked a great set of panelists to join me:

• John Romano, The Digital Beyond
• Bill LeFurgy, Library of Congress
• Adam Ostrow, Mashable
• Adele McAlear, DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com and Edelman Digital

We need your help getting through the Panel Picker. If you have a few spare moments visit our listing and give us a vote.

Introducing the panelists:

The official description:

When you kick the bucket, you’ll leave behind a vast amount of digital information: a lifetime’s worth of Tweets, emails, blogs, photos, videos and more. They’re the product of a creative life well lived.

In fact, this information forms a rich archive of who we are and what we think. But in a world of passing technology, will our digital selves simply fade away as the victim of neglect? Or will they live on in perpetuity like the Great Pyramids to be remembered and celebrated?

Libraries frequently preserve the collections of the significant and famous, but what about the rest of us? Does technology hold the key to widespread digital preservation? Or should we just die and be dead?

As we think about the future of experiencing the past, how should we prepare? What technology will we need? And what will that mean for society? Join our group of archivists, technologists and interaction designers who are going to discuss the challenges and opportunities of a digitally preserved world.

In the future, we aren’t going to fight the robots, we’re going to become the robots. In fact, it may be even sooner — like, now. We’ll have two AI-powered panelists taking questions from the audience.

Oh, we’ll have some great biological panelists, too. They’ll discuss artificial intelligence, digital avatars, and the future of identity. Along the way we’ll learn:

* Just how close we are to seeing self-aware, digital life forms
* How new AI technology might enhance our biological lives
* How digital avatars might keep living for you after you die

The singularity won’t be televised, folks. We’ll make sure you don’t miss it.

A new service has launched called Virtual Eternity that promises to create an “intelligent” avatar that can live on after you die. The avatar would look like you, sound like you, and respond to questions just like you do. And it could live on indefinitely after you are gone.

The site, virtualeternity.com, allows you to upload a photo of yourself. Immediately you begin to see your avatar take life. Their application makes your photo come alive. Your photo blinks and your mouth opens and closes as it talks. The head even bobs around naturally giving it an immediately life-life appearance.

So how does it work?

You begin by training it. You answer personality tests. You teach it to answer in the same way that you do. You also upload photos that your future avatar can talk about. You can even make a voice profile so that it talks in your voice.

Once it’s trained, it can answer questions that are typed into a text field. Now, it isn’t perfect. In fact, the makers say that it’s still in beta. It fails on many questions, but it answers some correctly. And you can assume that the more data that you give it the more that it’ll know about you. You can also assume that with time, effort and increased computing power, these avatars could get pretty high fidelity.

This is an amazing platform for knowing people from the past, whether they are famous people or your grandparent. And while its current functionality needs some work, the potential is here to offer people something that is really unprecedented and something that we have never seen before, except in science fiction.

In January I made a few predictions about digital afterlife trends for 2010. In that post I cited a prediction by TrendWatching.com that “profile myning” would be a crucial trend to watch in 2010. “Profile myning” is an intentional word play on profile mining, the process of extracting patterns and thus business intelligence from social profiles. I’ll quote their report again here:

With personal profiles (which are the nucleus of one’s personal brand) representing an ever-greater emotional and financial value, expect a burgeoning market for services that protect, store, and, in case of emergencies/death, arrange handing over of one’s digital estate to trusted others. – trendwatching.com

Now to recent news. Last week Facebook, in a blog post called “Giving You More Control” attributed to Mark Zuckerberg himself, announced new features. The usual privacy and functional enhancements were included, but of more interest to us here they announced a new feature that allows users to download their Facebook data. Once the feature is completely rolled out, users will be able to request a zipped file of their Facebook contributions. “Your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information” will all be included. I don’t see the download link in my account yet, but here’s what Facebook had to say about it, including a video that demonstrates the new feature:

First, we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.

If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download. To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions. We’ll begin rolling out this feature to people later today, and you’ll find it under your account settings.

I’ve got to hand it to the folks at TrendWatching.com as this sure sounds like “profile myning” to me. I’m also reminded of Twitter’s new policy for deceased users that was announced earlier this year. It allows for your heirs to obtain an archive of your public tweets. Although I have some issues with that policy, it, like the Facebook download, is a good feature that will help secure your digital content. After all, that content will become your digital legacy.

I think it’s a good move by Facebook. But, remember that Facebook deletes status updates made by deceased users as a part of memorializing a profile. Wouldn’t it be great if Facebook would share this download with your heirs? Wouldn’t it be even better if they asked you if you wanted that to happen and who should have access? That would be an ideal situation. But for now, you can make sure your digital executor has your Facebook password and is poised to request this download as soon as possible. Time is of the essence because anyone with a link to an obituary can request that a profile be memorialized.

One of the things I struggle with most is describing the value of planing for your digital afterlife. I often get the response “but won’t I be gone?” It’s salient that a big opportunity in this space is a solution that provides both immediate and long-term (after death) value. It’s been out for a few months now, but the DataInherit Password Safe for the iPhone does just that.

The App makes it easy to sign up for an account and begin storing passwords almost immediately. Like other digital afterlife services, your passwords are kept securely and you can specific who receives access upon your death. I really like the idea of having this information readily available when I need a password and when I change one. Kudos to the DataInherit team for a great tool.

It happens. Computers left behind by a loved one become locked boxes. Accounts become frozen. Treasured digital assets are lost. Now a new service is available that helps survivors unlock digital content.

Digital Estate Services (http://www.digitalestateservices.com) is here to help. Their service can help unlock local files, recover user names and passwords for online accounts, and find important documents from a spouse or loved one’s computer in the event that they didn’t leave access.

A list of events at SXSW that all deal with digital identities and afterlife.

Virtual Interviews: A Chat With Darwin’s Ghost
#syntheticinterview
Ralph Vituccio and John Dessler
Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center
Synthetic Interview is a unique technology that allows people to have a conversation with a character or persona as if that person were present in real-time. The goal is creating immersive experiences, allowing guests to interact with a digital character from either the past, the present or the future.

People Die, Profiles Don’t
#peopledieprofilesdont
Jesse Davis with Entrustet
Talk about companies and how they deal with users deaths. What can websites do to streamline the process of handling the deceased’s wishes for their online accounts?

eSee Technologies
#eSeetech
Ian Mitchell
Augmented Reality device that may serve life loggers and average Web users alike at eseetechnologies.com.

I also saw this article that Apple has hired Richard DeVaul of AWare Technologies who is an expert in heads up technology. Can you say iSee?

What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?
#phonehad5senses
Ted Power of Google
The phone in your pocket has the sense of sight (camera), sound (microphone), touch and location. They also have sense of light, proximity, acceleration, orientation. All these senses potentially serve to describe your experiences and enrich your digital identity.

My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete
#mylifetaketwo
Panel
Most of us have incidents in our past that we’d rather leave there – but that’s getting harder in a world teeming with tools and devices that capture our actions and record them forever. Do we have a ”right to delete” records and data about ourselves? Can we? Should we?

Have You Planned for Your Digital Afterlife?
Interview with Adel Mcalear
@DigitalLegacy

While doing some research recently, I started to think more about the  fields of study that together form a foundation for the digital afterlife.  I have always maintained that this is a multi-faceted topic, but I didn’t realize how true that statement was.

Identity – online content is a projection of our identity into the digital world.  E-mails, photos, connections and conversations provide a corpus of data allowing for unprecedented study and preservation of identity.

Human-computer interaction – the study of how we interact with computers.  Closely linked to identity, computers have become our companions in life.  They’re contents provide records of our thinking, communications and pleasures.

Estate planning – the traditional practice of law that helped individuals plan the disposition of their assets.  Our digital assets are becoming increasingly valuable.  It’s time for a legally-sound process to protect them and allow us to pass them along to the next generation.

Funeral service - end of life care and remembrance.  The way we remember and honor the decreased is changing.  Online memorials and gatherings are an increasing occurrence and are no less real than their offline counterparts.

Archives and preservation – archivists have worked for years to collect and preserve tangible information for centuries.  Now in an digital world they are working to collect and preserve not just physical, but “born digital” assets as well.

I’m sure that I missed a few.  Can you think of any others?  Comment it up, folks.

Many of you likely want to know what you can do to plan for your own digital afterlife. It’s something important to think about and we’re glad you’re here to get started.

Step one: Define your assets
A good first step is to inventory your online assets. Going through this process will not only result in a working list, the process will help you understand exactly how many assets you have. You’ll find more than you thought of beforehand.

Step two: Decide your wishes
Now that you have a list, go through it and decide what you would like to happen to each asset. Maybe you want it deleted, maybe you want it archived or perhaps you want it left alone. In any case, decide what you want to happen. It might also be a good idea to check the terms of service for any Web site for which you have a log in to see if they’ve already made some decisions for you.

Step three: Choose one or more executors
You won’t be around to push the buttons, so you’ll need a survivor to do it for you. Asking a trusted friend or relative to help is essential to having your wishes honored. Think about who is knowledgeable enough to help you out with your assets. Perhaps one person comes to mind or perhaps you want to divide tasks up amongst several people. We have more information about selecting executors here.

Step four: Document your wishes
Finally document your wishes and put them in a place that’s accessible by your executor(s). There are many online services that will help you out with this part. You may be able to do this yourself using a safe-deposit box or other security mechanism, but a service might make it easier or more secure for you. It’s important to think about how to best secure your information and passwords. Whatever you do, don’t list them in your will as that will become public record.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you make these decisions carefully and with the input of your relatives. If you have any concerns it’s never a bad idea to consult your attorney.