When planning your death, don’t forget to take your digital life into account

Lamm is a national expert on digital property issues and has conducted seminars everywhere to train attorneys on the topic. He also helped draft the Digital Asset Management and Disposal Act, which is now in effect in Minnesota and 47 other states.

Minnesota’s revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act went into effect in August 2016. You can then use online tools to name a trustee or representative who can access your digital data after your death.

“It allows us, at least with the proper permissions, to ask Google, Yahoo, Apple and Facebook for a copy of the account content,” Lamm said. “So we don’t have to deal with the passwords, the encryption, the data protection laws or the criminal laws.”

These online tools include:

In addition to using online tools, Suzanne Walsh, an estate planning attorney in Hartford, Connecticut, recommended signing a consent decree to allow online platforms to disclose digital assets that would otherwise be protected by the Stored Communications Act. This federal privacy law prohibits the disclosure of a person’s communications without their lawful consent. It compares the digital disclosure form to the consent forms that patients sign to enable disclosure of health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“Most companies haven’t created online tools, so we need to create this consent form as a backup,” Walsh said. “I refer to it as the HIPAA Digital Asset Form, which makes no sense, but explains that we are giving consent under the Federal Privacy Act.”