The recent endorsed plan of the Uniform Law Commission this week, giving families access to – but not control of – the deceased’s digital account, is raising some big questions. If this legislation would be adopted by the legislature, a person’s life could become as much a part of estate planning as deciding what to do with physical possessions. This might also jeopardizes the privacy of both the account’s owner and the people who communicate with them.

In the past few years, questions keep surfacing in regards to digital assets: What happens to our online accounts after we die? Should family be able to access a deceased user\’s profile at all? Amazingly enough, the internet is not as prepared for dealing with death as expected and despite putting every bit of our lives online, it seems that we are not ready for the digital afterlife.

What Really Happens After We Die?

One reoccurring issue that many families are dealing with is how to keep email and social media accounts active and accessible so they won’t lose their loved ones’ accounts or profiles. Families feel that it is their right and obligation to see or supervise their loved ones’ online legacy. Wanting to hold on to emails, pictures and videos, families have to deal with Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts that are being frozen, deleted or shut down.

None of these services allow families or friends to retrieve the passwords of the deceased. Their argument is that it would violate the user’s privacy. After losing a loved one, families dread losing their memory through their vanishing online identity. Many find themselves in legal battles over these issues. This raises an interesting debate about the rights of the deceased and family members in the new digital age.

Clean Up Your Digital Life

Our digital lives are spread across so many different services and social media platforms today. We upload photos, videos and text into Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and Vine. We check-in through Foresquare, share through Reddit, rate with TripAdvisor and Yelp, leaving many different pieces of the puzzle of our lives everywhere.

The internet may seem like a vast scrapbook that is going to be there forever but it isn’t. It could all be gone in an instant. infibond (www.infibond.com,) a new social media networking platform dedicated to dynamic online memorialization and personal legacy, was born to overcome this particular obstacle through its newly created platform.

“We created infibond out of a need,” said CEO Yoram Kraus. “37 million people pass away every year, leaving behind 250 million grieving family members and friends. We noticed there is no solution for eternal life on the web – social media accounts get deleted, frozen or shut down in many cases after a person dies and many times, families lose the memories, emails, photos and videos of their loved ones.”

infibond functions as a complementary tool to social media networks. When a social media user passes away, his account can automatically be transferred into infibond with all of his content. Other users can use this tool to collect their information – text, images, videos – and transfer it from their different social media accounts into one place, an infibond account. infibond functions as a scanner – scanning, locating and collecting information based on user preference and permissions, and putting it into one secure account. It\’s easy to get lost trying to find old memories in this digital pile. infibond was created to help users fix this virtual mess, organize, archive and straighten out our digital lives.

The Importance of Digital Legacy

People often ask themselves who they will irrevocably impact after they are gone. A personal legacy is the unique footprint we can leave as a record for our lives, and the arrival of the Internet has dramatically improved a person’s ability to create and preserve his personal legacy.

This is a new and exciting opportunity to create a complete personal legacy for the benefit of a person’s descendants. It involves a different strategy of planning and creating records of what one’s life has been all about. We know so little about our ancestors so this new way of archiving life will no doubt have a huge impact on people’s lives in the future, getting to know their ancestors on a much deeper level, having these personal records available and retrievable.

Although it seems that this digital age is much more complicated when it comes to dealing with death, more people realize the advantage of thinking about their digital footprint, choosing the right people to curate their profile and planning ahead, leaving more room for peace of mind in the final days. “Confronting people with these decisions early on saves a lot of headaches and heartaches down the road,” adds Kraus, “Many people don’t think about these kind of things until they are faced with it and do not realize what is about to be lost. ”

Lihi Raviv is the Director of Content and Social Media for Infibond.Com. Join Infibond

Lihi Raviv is the Director of Content and Social Media for http://www.infibond.com.

Author Bio: Lihi Raviv is the Director of Content and Social Media for Infibond.Com. Join Infibond

Category: Business
Keywords: Death, mourning, grieving, memorial, Digital Assets, rememberance, memory, Digital Will