The Digital Will: Protecting Your Legacy in Cyberspace

Does our digital life not deserve the same respect and care as our physical life? Today, our existence no longer takes place only within four walls — it also happens in cyberspace.

We invite you to do a quick mental inventory: stop for a second and count how many versions of yourself are living on the internet right now. That polished LinkedIn profile, your Instagram gallery full of travels, your emails from 10 years ago, or even your cryptocurrency savings. If you suddenly had to leave, what would happen to all those gigabytes of memories and invisible assets? Would they become chaos for your family?

The Risk of Not Planning Your Digital Life

Many people believe that writing down their passwords on a piece of paper and leaving them to someone is enough. However, this solution falls far short because passwords change, expire, and putting them in a public document poses an unnecessary security risk.

The real problem is that, without clear guidance, your heirs will hit a bureaucratic wall when facing tech giants that tend to be very inflexible about data privacy. Without legal backing, it is very difficult to resolve issues such as:

• Who will cancel that subscription service that keeps charging month after month on a blocked bank account?
• Who will rescue the family memories that only live in the cloud?

The Legal Solution: The Digital Executor and the Digital Will

Fortunately, the world is catching up. Although platforms like Google and Facebook have created tools that act as an emergency switch for inactive accounts, the legal figure of the Digital Executor (*Albacea Digital*) already exists. This is the trusted person to whom you can grant legal authority in your will to manage your virtual assets.

The concept of the digital will is the perfect tool to bring order to this area, giving you the power to hand over the keys to your virtual kingdom to the person you choose, and guaranteeing your right to have data from your past deleted. It is a necessary bridge between the coldness of computer code and the warmth of our most personal emotions.

What Can a Digital Will Cover?

A properly drafted digital will can address a surprisingly broad range of digital assets:

• Social media accounts — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (Twitter): decide whether they should be memorialised, deleted, or managed by your executor
• Email accounts — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo: specify whether your executor can access, archive, or delete your correspondence
• Cloud storage — Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox: ensure family photos, documents, and personal files are preserved or transferred
• Cryptocurrency and digital financial assets — Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs: without proper instructions, these assets can be permanently lost, as there is no bank to contact
• Subscription services — Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, SaaS tools: avoid months of unnecessary charges on a blocked account
• Domain names and websites — personal blogs, business domains: ensure continuity or proper transfer
• Digital intellectual property — unpublished manuscripts, code repositories, design files: protect your creative legacy
• Online business accounts — Shopify stores, advertising accounts, affiliate programmes: critical for business continuity