Ask HN: What are your digital end-of-life plans?
5 comments
What I’ve done:
All of my passwords and passkeys are in Bitwarden. My brother has emergency access, and I’ve documented in Bitwarden Secure Notes my device credentials, recovery codes, estate information, and instructions for accessing my accounts.
One unresolved issue:
I have private photos of current romantic partners in my iOS Photos hidden album. I want my next of kin to be able to access the rest of my digital life, but I also want to protect those people’s privacy.
As far as I know, Apple doesn’t provide a way to grant next-of-kin access to an account while excluding hidden photos.
My current solution is a note asking my brother to delete the hidden photos before looking through the rest of my account. I trust him to do that, but I’d prefer a technical solution.
Is there a better approach?
All of my passwords and passkeys are in Bitwarden. My brother has emergency access, and I’ve documented in Bitwarden Secure Notes my device credentials, recovery codes, estate information, and instructions for accessing my accounts.
One unresolved issue:
I have private photos of current romantic partners in my iOS Photos hidden album. I want my next of kin to be able to access the rest of my digital life, but I also want to protect those people’s privacy.
As far as I know, Apple doesn’t provide a way to grant next-of-kin access to an account while excluding hidden photos.
My current solution is a note asking my brother to delete the hidden photos before looking through the rest of my account. I trust him to do that, but I’d prefer a technical solution.
Is there a better approach?
For the unresolved photos issue; I am not an iOS user so not sure if there's any application to help you easily achieve that goal on that platform. But in general, you can encrypt the sensitive files themselves(either files or directory).
You'll lose the ability to easily and quickly look at the photos, as in a single click and you're in, but the process would achieve what you want. To view the photos, you can mount a decrypted version whenever you actually want to look at them and can automate some of this process if it is time consuming or you do it frequently. This is all much easier to do on a computer rather than a mobile a device.
On Linux, there's ecryptfs. There were a few other similar tools in various states of maturity and maintenance when I checked. Perhaps look into something similar for your platform.
You'll lose the ability to easily and quickly look at the photos, as in a single click and you're in, but the process would achieve what you want. To view the photos, you can mount a decrypted version whenever you actually want to look at them and can automate some of this process if it is time consuming or you do it frequently. This is all much easier to do on a computer rather than a mobile a device.
On Linux, there's ecryptfs. There were a few other similar tools in various states of maturity and maintenance when I checked. Perhaps look into something similar for your platform.
I think the biggest edge case is not having a way to test the process. I also think that if you're concerned about it, you should have a recurring (annual perhaps) exercise to make sure everyone involved remembers what to do.
Ask HN: How will you manage your digital assets when you die?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266753
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266753
I’ve set up emergency access to my password manager and documented my device credentials, account recovery information, and estate-related information.
I’m curious what others have done.
Have you made plans for account access, passwords, 2FA devices, photos, cloud storage, domains, financial assets, online businesses, AI chat histories, and other digital assets?
I feel like I’ve covered the basics, but I’m not confident I’ve thought through all potential edge cases.