Use Cyber Laws to Protect Our Digital Legacy

Most people usually rely on lawyers to carry out what's specified in their last will and testament after they die. But as people are more involved in the digital world, cyber laws are urgently needed to help us handle our digital legacies.

Jenn Steffensen brings us more.

Report:

Digital legacy is relatively a new concept for most people. It can be categorized into three types: financial assets, including bank accounts and loans; personal information, which includes name, email addresses, birthday, educational background and health information; and archives and documents that are of value to an individual and his family.

After a person dies, most of this information remains unknown to his family and disappears into a cyber abyss.

But some countries are taking steps to prevent this from happening. Attorney Michael Zhang says the United States has now passed laws and regulations to handle cyber legacies.

"Recently, the United States government has passed a federal regulation imposing stronger control over web-based companies, and also the state of California recently passed a law. About 25 other states have followed."

But whether a decedent's personal information should be protected by privacy laws remains a problem.

Liu Deliang is Director of the Asia-Pacific Institute for Cyber-law Studies.

"I don't think all sorts of information can be protected under the privacy law—only those that are directly related to personal dignity."

Identity theft, especially concerning deceased celebrities, is a huge concern.

"Certain people have registered domain names under some celebrity's name, and the court has routinely ruled the domain name should be transferred back to the celebrity if it is registered for commercial use. But if it is for personal use, that's another story."

Besides the laws and regulations, a new online service called Legacy Locker protects valuable personal information and makes it available to an designated person after someone passes away. The website stores users' passwords for important services such as email and social networks and delivers them to a caretaker in the event of the person's passing away.

For CRI, I'm Jenn Steffensen.