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...how do I pass on all my online stuff to my kids?*
I know how much they'd value my Coldplay album collection, but it's all owned through my Google account up in the ether. These days we have so much of the assets of our lives in the cloud, have we given them up to licence agreements that only last our lifetime or are there organisations out there backing it all up so that we can pass it on on our deaths?
What else have we taken off the book shelf or out of the filing cabinet where our kids can fight over it during probate, and put out of reach in the hands of Google, Apple, MS and Dropbox?
* not intending to be morbid, just am downloading a shed load of music to a new SD card in my phone and got to wondering....
IIRC Bruce Willis tried to see if he could leave his digital iTunes collection to his children and didn't get anywhere. Though I could be wrong.
Ask Bruce Willis.
As long as they have the login and password I can't see there being a problem.
I'm old school and have most of my stuff on a RAID but there is some stuff that no doubt have forgotten about. 6TB of Raid stores a lot of stuff in a tiny space. The important stuff is also on line as a backup.
Officially access to pretty much everything dies with you, you're just renting access to the files until you die, close the account, the company goes out of business or changes its terms of access.
If you leave the account details then it can be accessed by whoever has them, the difficulty come when those accounts need to be closed and any account that has payment facilities associated with it should really be closed as soon as is practical. Even if your beneficiary chooses not to close the account and continue pretending to be you (morally I couldn't care but legally I think they would be on dodgy ground) there will come a time when the credit card associated with the account will expire and need to be renewed. I guess at this point the games is probably up.
Edit
Anything that requires regular payments directly from a bank account would stop being useful from the point of the next due payment, as your accounts would need to be frozen as soon as the bank is informed of your death, which should really be very quick. Failure to inform the bank and wilfully continuing to use the account of someone that's deceased tends to not go down well.