Digital Assets

10 May 2021

Our blog this month coincides with Dying Matters Awareness Week and we feature a guest post from Martyn Milsom of Milsom Consulting Ltd. He is a member of the Society of Will Writers, Chartered Insurance Institute and Certified Certificate Providers with the Office of the Public Guardian.

Digital Assets: a key theme for Dying Matters Awareness Week

Next week is Dying Matters Awareness Week.  The campaign, which runs from 10th – 16th May, is a chance for organisations and individuals to come together and break the taboo around confronting death.  To open up conversations about death, dying and bereavement, one of the key themes of the ‘Dying Matters Awareness Week’ is digital assets and digital legacies.

So, what are Digital Assets or Legacies?

Digital assets are possessions that are purchased, stored or available on digital devices or online services. These may include photos, videos, music, websites, blogs and eBooks.  They can be of monitory and sentimental value.

Photos uploaded to a social network may have no monitory value but contain high sentimental value. Whereas cryptocurrency (Bitcoin etc) may not contain any sentimental value, they may contain a high monitory value. A music library purchased digitally (as MP3s, WAVs etc) may contain both sentimental value and monitory value to the owner and the person or persons who inherits the library.

A digital legacy is the digital information that is available about someone following their death. Someone’s digital legacy is often shaped by interactions the person made and information that they created before they died. This might include their social media profiles, online conversations, photos, videos, gaming profiles and their website or blog.

Someone’s digital legacy can also be informed by content that is created or co-created by others. This may include interactions that have occurred on someone else’s social media wall or stream. Someone’s digital legacy might be informed by what others have posted online about the person in a newspaper, blog or external website. A digital legacy can be altered, edited and changed before, during or after someone’s death.

According to UK Wills and Probate Market 2020 report, this digital way of thinking is slowly growing, with 32% of clients who have, or intend to include, digital assets or legacies into their Wills last year.  This has risen from 27% in 2018.

Estate Practitioners are now commonly advising clients to consider what should happen to their social media accounts and online gaming accounts, as well as online banking and investment accounts. As we’ve seen in the national media, when things go wrong with digital assets, they can have catastrophic repercussions.  One example being that of Stefan Thomas.

The BBC reported in January that Stefan had just two attempts left to correctly enter his password to unlock his hard drive that contained approximately £175m worth of Bitcoin.  He was allowed 10 failed attempts to access the hard drive, when all of these attempts had lapsed his Bitcoin would be inaccessible.  Mr Thomas had written the password on a piece of paper and subsequently misplaced it.  Having tried and failed to input the correct password eight times, he began to worry about losing a small fortune forever.

More information on the story is available here.

Naturally, these assets are more common in the younger generation, however everyone should consider the implications of not including these details in their Will.

Earlier this year, The Law Society have been stressing the importance of including ‘digital assets’ in Wills by urging people to include digital assets when dealing with their affairs, after research reveals that 75% of people do not know, or have not considered, what happens to their online presence after they die.  It also showed that 93% of people they surveyed had not included any digital assets in their Will.

Furthermore, Hargreaves Lansdown conducted their own research recently, to coincide with the Dying Matters Awareness campaign, on what families knew about their parents’ legacy plans. Their results reveal only two in five people (42%) are certain their parents have even made a Will and fewer than one in ten (9%) think their parents have a register of assets (details of accounts, investments, pensions and insurance policies) to make it easier for those they leave behind to untangle their finances.  In addition, one in five said their parents definitely have not drawn up any documents relating to their death, and a third said they knew their parents have made a Will, but do not know where to find it.

As we make plans to ensure that the items and assets we own are passed on to those we care about in the physical world, so we should do so for those assets we use and own in the digital world. 

If you’re using internet connected devices and the associated digital platforms it’s important that you make plans for these assets, so that they are protected and pass to those you care about.  With many of our day-to-day activities now taking place online, it’s essential for people to consider the implications of not providing access to digital assets.

You may have videos uploaded to Facebook, photos stored on Instagram, purchased media on iTunes or Spotify, Bitcoin in a Cryptocurrency wallet; even a blog or a website. Whatever online services you use it important that you make relevant plans for each. You should not solely entrust online platforms with this information.

So how do you do this?

It’s important that you make plans for all your digital assets and legacies and the devices and accounts they are held in. You may want to do this by documenting your wishes within a Social Media Will.  This can then be reinforced by empowering your Executors to deal with these digital assets in accordance with your wishes.

Currently this Social Media Will document is not currently legally binding, but instead a statement of preferences.  Due to the complex nature of the internet and each online platform’s own ‘terms of service’ it is impossible for peoples online wishes to be legally binding.

Keeping your records up to date can avoid complications for your friends and family when you die. It also helps ensure the process of dealing with end-of-life administration is quickly and efficiently finalised.

What is clear is that if you do not document your plans for your digital estate, there’s a high probability that items of a monitory and sentimental value may be withheld from your loved ones or claimed by the online service provider.

£4 billion of Bitcoin has been lost for this exact reason!