Digital Legacy

Digital legacy encompasses a deceased person's smartphone data, social media accounts, cloud-stored files, cryptocurrency, and subscriptions. Families often cannot access these assets without passwords.

QR codes on tombstones link to memorial pages with photos, biographies, and messages, expanding beyond physical space limitations. In end-of-life planning, the safer pattern is to leave only an inventory of which services hold accounts, and to entrust the passwords and private keys themselves to a password manager's emergency access feature, a trust, or a sealed document held in custody, methods that record who opened what, and when. A QR code is a public symbol anyone can read straight off the paper, and even encrypted contents need the decryption key delivered by another route, so it suits neither the credentials themselves nor a pointer to where they are kept. A "digital will" in this sense is a memorandum about where assets are, not a will meeting the statutory formalities, and on its own it carries no legal force.