Digital assets did not exist 25 years ago, but they are now part of our everyday existence.  Things like the contents of our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, photographs stored online, digital music, YouTube videos, on-line gaming accounts, domain names, and email are all digital assets – a collection of our digital property and electronic communications.  To the extent these accounts contain information that you would like someone to be able to access after your death or incapacity, it is necessary to plan to provide the appropriate authority and instructions for what you want done with these “assets.”  For some types of these assets, planning is crucial to prevent financial loss (i.e. the loss of a domain name used for business purposes), to protect sensitive personal information (on-line dating websites), to avoid identity theft, and to allow access to valuable assets (think bitcoin, an author’s manuscript, or family photographs).

Most of us create digital assets without a thought as to what will happen to those “assets” if we are no longer around or able to access them.  Even if you share your password for your on-line accounts with a trusted person, keep in mind that it is a violation of federal law for anyone other than you to access your accounts (because password sharing is prohibited under most terms of service agreements) unless the person with whom you share your password has the legal authority to access your account.

This is an emerging area of estate planning.  The Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA) is an attempt to create some clarity in this area.  Massachusetts is one of only a handful of states that has not enacted this law, or even introduced it for consideration.  Hopefully our state legislature will not delay much longer.  The law allows fiduciaries to take action to marshall and protect the digital assets of the deceased or incapacitated person on whose behalf they are acting.  As a rule, access is difficult to obtain because on-line providers all have different policies or terms of service agreements with their customers.  The Uniform Act’s purpose is to bring some uniformity to these policies as they relate to fiduciaries, and to extend a fiduciary’s power over assets in a deceased or incapacitated person’s “estate” to include digital assets, giving a fiduciary the legal right to access online accounts.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is in the process of deciding the case of Ajemian v. Yahoo!, Inc.  In this case Mr. Ajemian died with a Yahoo email account, and  Yahoo would not allow access to his account to his siblings who were the administrators of his estate.  This case has been bouncing around the court system since 2007 on procedural grounds, including whether the case had to be decided by a California court (where Yahoo is located) or whether the case was properly decided in Massachusetts where Mr. Ajemian was a resident prior to his death.  The Court now seems poised to decide the substantive issue of access to emails, after oral arguments in March of this year.

Here are some tips to manage your digital assets until Massachusetts law and a path to access becomes clearer:

• If an online entity offers a way for you to give permission or access to your digital assets stored with that company, pay attention and follow the directions. For example, Facebook allows you to designate a Legacy Contact (Settings/General Account Settings/Manage Account) who can manage your account after your die, or you can choose to have your account deleted if you pass away. Google allows you to control what happens to your account through their Inactive Account Manager feature (My Account/Personal Info and Privacy/Control your Content).  Here you can designate when your account will be considered inactive and what will happen to your Google account, and designate one or more people who will have access to whatever portions of your Google account you choose.
• Update your estate plan documents, specifically your Power of Attorney, Will and Trust, to ensure those documents provide express permission for the fiduciaries named in those documents to access your digital assets, and express direction regarding what should be done with specific digital assets at death. In our office, we include express permission for access in these documents, and provide our clients with a Digital Assets Memorandum that can be used to record instructions about digital assets.

Keep in mind that if you have not used an online entity’s prescribed method of giving someone permission to access your account, and do not have express permission and direction in your estate plan documents, the company’s Terms of Service Agreement will govern. In such a case, you and your digital assets are at the mercy of the online provider, which may not allow access following your death or incapacity.

September 2017

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