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No. Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. You can cause problems if you subvert them, as there's processes to go

• tekeous 4y ago
  I have 663 Steam games, you bet your sweet bippy that’s going in the will
  • shakna 4y ago
    I believe Steam explicitly states that accounts are non-transferable.
    • ekianjo 4y ago
      How do they check if people are still alive or not?
      • brokenmachine 4y ago
        Why would they need to, if it's not transferable?
  • t-3 4y ago
    You can just give them your hard drive, why bother with the account?
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    You will own nothing and be happy.
• jmathai 4y ago
  In case of my death, I want to make it as easy as possible for my wife to carry on. Having access to our accounts (which I mostly manage) so she can do whatever she needs is a lot more important than the well-established processes you mentioned. Those processes would have gone to her anyway. If we both die, then our extended family will have to work through the legal system but our will + a lawyer should help out a lot. Edit: To answer the original question - I documented how my wife could do this before going on a week long motorcycle ride in 2019 :).
  • lupire 4y ago
    OK but those are passwords she should have now, not only when you die.
    • jmathai 4y ago
      She does have (access to) them now but she'll likely only ever use or need to use them after I die. It's a lot easier for her to ask me a question than figure out how to log in and find it herself.
• jakub_g 4y ago
  The tricky thing is that if no one from family knows you have $$$ in Bank Foo, this money can just lie there unclaimed forever (until taken by the government after N years). Even if theoretically those institutions should proactively search for deceased owners' heirs in some jurisdictions, I wouldn't trust this to happen. At least listing all banks, stocks accounts & insurances you have might be really useful. Just set a yearly reminder to self in calendar to send such an email to your closest family member.
  • lupire 4y ago
    Not really. There is a legal process for returning/forwarding unclaimed property. www.Unclaimed.org,
    • jakub_g 4y ago
      There is more than one country in the world I believe, and details and laws differ in each country.
      • nuclearnice1 4y ago
        Hey! Fair point but don't be snarky.
  • SkyPuncher 4y ago
    So make a list. You don't need to disclose the passwords, just make a list. Also, just keep your mail. Everything important in your life will send you mail.
  • hawaiianbrah 4y ago
    I made a document of important details like this. Where my various accounts are, what they are etc.
  • alias_neo 4y ago
    A colleague of mine has some inheritance in a European country; he's been taking trips out there every few years to try and get hold of it; every time he does, the new guy who runs the place needs _some other_ document, some dozens of _other_ documents later, still no money. This is in part because said country's process requires a document that literally doesn't exist for the home country of either party in this inheritance; they won't give him the money, and they won't take the money, so it just sits there indefinitely.
• paranoidrobot 4y ago
  > Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. I would say that the exception might be for local/non-cloud things - for instance your phone, laptop, NAS, etc. If you are the controller/admin of data that might be good for others to have (family photos/videos/etc) - then setting up some process for handing passwords over for that to Next of Kin would be good. As for services, utilities, etc - having literally just been through this in the past few weeks, it's incredibly frustrating that so many businesses don't have well established and functional processes for dealing with accounts owned by the deceased. The executor reached out to the services that needed to be terminated with sale of the house, and without fail they all screwed up in some dumb way. Most of them keep insisting on only being able to talk to the deceased person, even when you're the executor of the estate. (And they don't understand that, either). We ended up having to send registered tracked letters to their formal mailing addresses for several because of how insistent they were on sticking to their "only the account holder can make changes" script. Despite them having copies of the death certificate, extracts from the will, etc.
  • lupire 4y ago
    You should share shared content with them now, not after you die.
    • paranoidrobot 4y ago
      They may already have access to it, or some subset of it. You might not share all of it for various reasons, including not wanting to just dump years of photos on them that they have no interest in. That access might go away though and they might need information about how certain bits of that information are stored, and what they need to do in order to preserve it.
• OJFord 4y ago
  This might be a naïve young person take, but consider that we're in very early days of 'people with passwords dying', really. Nobody has grown up with digital assets and died of 'old age'. I don't want to overstate the value of random digital assets, like you say your Steam library or Reddit account likely has far more (even exclusively) value to you, but many things that do have sentimental value, or might for some, are ever increasingly digital where they historically obviously weren't. Even just correspondence that might make it easier to sort things out is now predominantly email. (And to my point above, more recently born people more likely to have opted in to 'paperless'.)
  • bsjaux628 4y ago
    Not at all, I do think that in the next de cates there will be a push to regulate the transfers of digital assets as inheritance; hell it might force companies to stop with the bs of selling you a license but wording it always as if you owned the product
  • shakna 4y ago
    And those places, do, in fact have processes regarding deceased and/or power of attorney. [0] This is not something that has sprung up out of nowhere. People die, everyday, which means that these companies have to deal with that fallout, today, not at some strange point out in the distant future. [0] https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?h...
    • OJFord 4y ago
      My point is it's happened to a miniscule number of people compared to the (roughly) steady state we'll eventually reach when it's not just the relatively 'techie' older generations & newer ones dying 'before their time'. 'People', as opposed to the companies that you say deal with the fallout everyday, will be a lot more aware of the scenarios and problems it might cause, and what they can or cannot do to ease it.
    • yencabulator 4y ago
      I don't think Google's preparedness in this area is representative of the average company's preparedness.
• mgbmtl 4y ago
  In the early COVID days, a friend got really sick and then in a comma for 4 weeks, followed by a few weeks where he couldn't talk. His wife, who also helped with running his business (small shop, 4 employees), tried to get access to the business bank account in order to pay the bills. Cloud services would expire, services shutdown, they would lose a lot of clients. She couldn't pay the bills, because while she was his next of kin, that only works if he dies. So anyway, having procedures for death is one thing, but don't forget scenarios like being in a coma for a few weeks, or being kidnapped, etc.
  • stevenbedrick 4y ago
    This is exactly the sort of nightmare scenario that (in the US, anyway) a durable power of attorney document is supposed to help with!
    • judge2020 4y ago
      Not to mention simple 99/1% split co-ownership of an actual corporation, so legal power to act on behalf of the business without the ability to takeover full ownership pre-death.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Except everything these days is moving to SaaS webservices, most of which are moving too fast and breaking too many things to bother with a process for delegated access with or without power-of-attorney (or with having any customer support process at all). This will sort itself out in the coming decades, but for now, you have to manage this on your own.
      • yieldcrv 4y ago
        this was a big issue for me with crypto exchanges last decade. they could not understand the concept of anything besides a single-user personal account. KYC can only be tied to one account. have a trust? LLC? non-profit? corporation? anything? whoosh, right over their heads now? the exchanges all have this, pretty easy to onboard a whole hedge fund onto them now. but the crypto tax services, single-user personal account incapable of understanding other tax circumstances. there are ways (like exporting data to more robust software), just wish it was easier already. but don't get me started on the on-chain stuff...
• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > I doubt any of my next of kin care about e.g. my Steam library Okay but can I get it then? On a serious note, I doubt it is something inheritable. I haven't read the terms of use but I am 100% sure you cannot inherit a Steam account, the same way you're not authorize to buy one. I'm sure it goes the same with 99% of the online services that you may be subscribed to.
  • alias_neo 4y ago
    My pet peeve here is that they should be forced to change the "buy" button to a "rent" button or something. All of this digital assetry we're "buying" isn't actually ours, and that's one of the greatest annoyances of the "digital future" for me. That said, I couldn't give a shit, nor, I suspect could my wife and kids, whether my Steam library and Google Movies (or whatever) stick around after I expire.
  • aniforprez 4y ago
    There's no need to "inherit" a steam account. If you have the credentials to log in, you can update the payment methods with new ones and just continue to use the account. Everything, including save files that are stored on their servers for supported games, will continue to simply work as long as steam exists. People actually can and do swap accounts and sell credentials all the time. There are third party sites that are made selling steam accounts for money So far, I've been too young to actually set anything up but with all these things stored in my 1Password and other storage accounts, I need some way to legally hand down credentials to my next of kin
• nraynaud 4y ago
  Some things became a pain in the butt after my mom passed away and her accounts were frozen (like they bounced her income tax payment, and her electricity bill, and hijacking some other utilities was a pain). But we decided not to mess too much with the legal process anyway, because we didn’t feel like we knew enough to intervene (and we did not inherit for months, so we legally had limited standing).
• ohbleek 4y ago
  My brother recently passed away unexpectedly and I can say with certainty that the well established processes are not smooth, and in fact I’d say that it’s a 50/50 shot that even when you follow each step to a “T” - have all of the paperwork and talk with everyone you can reach - you’ll receive no help at all. After weeks you’ll simply be told the accounts can’t be made available to you and there is nothing you can do. Trying to navigate these processes while also managing your grief, increases the level of difficulty By a magnitude. Apart from that, an unexpected death leaves a hole that your loved ones will try to fill with anything you have left behind, it’s impossible to anticipate what they will want to keep of yours when you’re gone. All I can say is that if you ever have the thought that it would be helpful to write a few things down in case the worst were to happen, do it. It’s hard to fully explain how much easier it will make the grieving process.
• brandonv 4y ago
  >Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. Banks have next-of-kin processes because they're required to, most companies are not. With banks, it can take weeks or months to access an account after someone has died. Even when they let you freeze an account, what if that account was also paying for your family’s life insurance or health insurance? This would be easy if you can just share passwords, but it is illegal to access someone’s bank account or email account after they die without having all the legal docs and following the company’s process. Even if you do everything right, some companies may never give you access. When a girl died of mysterious circumstances, Facebook refused to help her family determine whether her death was suicide or murder: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/facebook-fights-for-deceased-beauty-queens-privacy/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/facebook-fights-for-... If I ever die of mysterious circumstances…
• LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Subscriptions might not fail--what if they are tied to an account that's retained?