The media in which a digital inheritance resides can be fully owned by the deceased or under the control of a proprietary service provider.
Issues center around user privacy, intellectual property rights, and the legal liability of online corporations.
Large online service providers are increasingly offering options for users to make decisions on what happens to their data, and who can access it, in the event of their death.
[2] Examples of this include the online services provided by large corporations such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.
With the average person having 150 online accounts that require a password,[3] digital inheritance has become a complex legal and ethical issue.
Legal conflicts surrounding digital inheritance center around questions of intellectual property rights, user privacy, and estate law.
There is a distinction in law between full ownership and right-to-use licenses such as in software, digital music, film and books and there is legal precedent for denying resale or bequest of these.
Originally passed in 1986, the SCA sought to protect communication privacy by prohibiting service providers from disclosing a customer's electronically stored content to a third party.
One possible solution in the United States calls for a revision to the SCA allowing an exemption for digital estate beneficiaries.
This would create less liability for online service providers and allow them to grant a beneficiary access to a deceased user's account as an authorized third party.
[7] Another possible solution would be an entirely new federal law regulating the handling of digital assets after death, in which the designated administrator of an estate would receive full access to the deceased user's online accounts.
This option would allow users to choose whether or not they desire their content to be preserved and to whom they would grant access, accommodating their right to privacy.
[11] This piece of legislation seeks to balance the interests of digital estate administrators and the privacy concerns of internet account users and service providers.
[13] A successfully implemented digital inheritance process has both personal and societal benefits which highlight the concept's importance.
Failure to respond to multiple emails makes the service provider assume that the person is deceased and they will disclose the passwords as previously requested.
They allow users to connect their social accounts, file storage services, and bitcoin wallets to one "vault".
They will, however, deactivate an account for someone who is "authorized to act on the behalf of the estate, or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased" provides the user's death certificate and their own government-issued ID.
[17] Both Facebook and Twitter have been prey to hoax celebrity death announcements and memorial pages, as well as being entangled in legal battles for the rights to access a departed loved one's social profiles,[19] leading to the need for official action and processes.
Some organizations ensure that digital inheritance will be protected in the event new technology emerges over periods of generational succession.