Digital Assets after Death...What Happens to Your Phone?

Learn what you need to know to appoint access to a "digital heir" and things to think about to ensure your digital life is in good hands after you die. 

In this Episode:

• 04:46 - A Man Named Ove
• 07:29 - Recipe of the Week: Tornado Potatoes
• 08:22 - Digital Assets When We Die: Our Phones (Interview with Niki Weiss)
• 39:19 - Outro

Transcript

Digital-Assets-After-Death…What-Happens-to-Your-Phone

This podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies, the podcast where we talk about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement.

I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 45 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast. We are both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions when a crisis hits.

So welcome to this week's show. Please relax, get yourself something comforting to drink, something maybe a long, cool drink, some watermelon would be tasty, and thank you for spending the next hour with Charlie and me as we talk about digital death. Like the BBC, we see our show as offering entertainment, enlightenment, and education, and divide that into three halves to address each of these goals.

Our main topic is in the second half, so feel free to fast forward to that babble-free zone if you need to. In the first half, Charlie has a reading from Frederick Bachman's A Man Called Ove, and our recipe of the week. In the second and third half, I'm going to talk about death in the digital age with our guest, Nikki Weiss, who is CEO and founder of The Final Playbook.

Today, we have our first in a series of podcasts about death in the digital age. This information is important for you to include with making your will an advanced directive so that your family can avoid a real mess after your death and prevent those salty pictures you took during intimate times with your partner and make sure they don't get splashed across the internet after your death. You're welcome.

So Charlie, how are you? Wait, hang on a minute, Marianne, I'm making a note here. Salty pictures going back to, when did the internet start again? Well, okay, I just need to make a mental note of this for me. I'm sure your salty pictures are older than the internet, Charles.

Oh, you know, I wish I could disagree with you. Unfortunately, I can't. Well, I've known you since you were 20, so.

No. I mean, not that I've been privy to your salty pictures, thank God, but. Gosh, since I were 20, that's crazy.

I know. When I was 17, it was a very good year. Oh, Lord.

Moving on. You know, this is probably going to be difficult and hard for you to believe, but it'd be hot. It'd be more than hot.

It'd be very hot with humidity. Well, you know, I get alerts on the bottom of my computer screen and I've been getting for three weeks straight, heat advisory in Eufaula, and the other night it said really hot, and I thought they're running out of adjectives to describe. Wait a minute, the advisory actually said really hot? Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. They're running out of adjectives to describe the heat.

Um, recently, actually just yesterday, I was in South Carolina and it's just a different heat. It's, um, I don't want to say it's alligator country, but where I was staying, yeah, and we're not talking Wally Gator either. It's just a different heat.

Is it a hotter heat? A humidor heat? It's a humid heat. I don't know how to describe it other than it's a combination of heat and humidity. Humidity wins out, but it's just a real intense heat.

I don't know. I have no other way to describe it. And I assume you weren't picking cotton or anything like that.

No, I was not. I was not. Well, folks, for our first half, A Man Called Of is the story of an elderly man who, in his grief, finds purpose and meaning in life, the impact one's life can have on others, and the transformative power of friendship and love.

The story also touches on grief, loss, and learning to move forward after hardship. The section we have for you today comes at the end of the book after Ove has a massive heart attack. Death is a strange thing.

People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it is often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us in time become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis.

Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by and leave us there alone.

People had always said that Ove was bitter, but he wasn't bloody bitter. He just didn't go around grinning the whole time. Did that mean one had to be treated like a criminal? Ove hardly thought so.

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound. And time is a curious thing.

Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us. A few days, weeks, years. One of the most painful moments in a person's life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is no more to look back on than ahead.

And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for. Memories, perhaps. Afternoons in the sun with someone's hand clutched in one's own.

The fragrance of flower beds in fresh bloom. Sundays in a cafe. Grandchildren, perhaps.

One finds a way of living for the sake of someone else's future. And if it wasn't as if Ove also died when Sonja left him, he just stopped living. Grief is a strange thing.

I like that passage. We all know too well what a strange thing grief is. So too is the weather.

So for your next funeral lunch, bring the gift of carbs in the form of this week's recipe Tornado Potatoes. They're twisted, but oh so good. Bon Appetit.

Folks, I'm going through puberty, folks, please go to our webpage for this week's recipe for Tornado Potatoes and additional resources for this program. Your tax-deductible donations are always welcome so that we can continue to offer you quality programming. Thank you in advance for making your donation at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one, dies.org. Marianne? Thank you, Charlie.

You know, a few weeks ago, we talked about what would likely be the causes of death in the next decade or so. And we have a link for that in the show notes. You can look it up.

And when I was running that show, I was reading about this other major shift that we can see coming that is increasing integration of digital legacy management. And as technology continues to evolve and become more ingrained in our daily lives, the way we handle digital assets and online presence after death is really going to undergo an extensive transformation. The change will include the management of digital assets, which encompasses a wide range of items, including social media accounts, digital memories, online financial assets, cryptocurrencies, digital files, our telephones, all of which hold fundamental financial or practical value.

So for this week, I've invited Nikki Wise to join us. And she is a digital legacy thanatologist and works in death tech thought. And she's the leader and founder of My Final Playbook Systems app.

Today, we're going to be chatting about what happens if suddenly both me and my phone stop. So I want to welcome Nikki Wise. Hi, Nikki.

Hey, Marianne. This is an awesome opportunity. Thank you for inviting me.

And thank you for being here and helping us understand this whole idea of what can happen. I was really sick about 10 years ago and I had my phone on me and I kind of really crashed from a bad pneumonia. And then the phone actually, you know, ran out of juice and died.

And nobody really knew how to get into my phone and get the information that was needed. And that was 10 years ago when we weren't even so reliant on our phones. So can you talk to us about what happens when everything shuts down, both, you know, in a technology point of view? I mean, we talk about here when the body shuts down, we kind of have a sense of that.

But what happens when our technology is all closed off for us or for our family members? And it's amazing how just in a very short period of time that our phones have become an existential part of ourselves. So much of our lives we are documenting on our phone. I know for me, if there's from a panic standpoint, if I lost my phone or my wallet, I would certainly have more anxiety losing my phone than my wallet in this day and age, which certainly was not the case many years ago.

So in trying to allow people to really understand the technology that is in our phones today. So the scenario I always present to someone to kind of wake them out of their stupor is, hey, life happens. We're all going to die.

If you die tomorrow from a car accident and your phone died with you, think about multi-factor authentication, how much chaos would ensue to those you leave behind? Think about it. How much chaos is there? Like you talk about multi-factor authentication, right? So I guess it depends, right? What happens? It depends. Now, if I'm talking to a 60, 70 or 80 year old, probably less, right? So they might not have a ton of apps on their phone and there might be less dependency on their entertainment and digital assets, such as passwords and photos and access to accounts, such as our bank accounts, demo accounts, social media accounts.

So it is a bit of a, I'm going to say, could be a generational conversation, but certainly for those people that are extremely active in their lives and are plugged in, their life lives on their phone. And so does all their access and passwords. And I would say probably in the last two to three years, it's becoming more lawful for companies to provide their privacy laws.

So we're always getting those email updates on your privacy. Well, those privacy laws have a lot of documentation in there that protects you if you're alive, but it does not protect you or give you a remediation plan if you're gone, if you're dead postmortem, what happens to your access postmortem. So what does happen? I mean, I'm trying to think it through in my head and I'm like, it sounds like a real mess, but really what does happen? So for those, some people have experienced it.

So what happens if your phone dies and no one has access to your phone, right? I would say that they cannot get into your bank account. If you are dependent on your bank accounts and your bank account is attached to what we call that multi-factor authentication, and if people aren't familiar with that term, it's when you're trying to get into an account and then the bank or the credit card company or nowadays it could be even your utility company will send you in a text message verifying that this is you for your own protection. So the protection, the walls that are now trying to protect our identity also is not allowing our loved ones to be able to access our identity when we're gone.

So if the primary caregiver in the family say, and it's very common where if you have a two person household, there might be one person in the household that is like the master the gatekeeper of all the accounts, right? So they've got all the passwords, they know they pay all the bills every month, they know how to access and so forth, where the other person might have other responsibilities and not be so connected digitally. But if that primary person, something happens to them, the secondary person who doesn't have that digital access, they will not be able to get into those accounts, will not be able to get into those accounts unless certain safeguards are set up. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about today and what is currently possible in trying to share information with people so they can best prepare.

And then also understand that there are some things that are just not available to us now. And to understand when you start legally, and it's a legal conversation, start walking the line of, okay, this person is now gone, but I have access to their phone, or I remember their password to get in, say the phone doesn't die with them, say the phone lives, but they're gone, or they're in an incapacitated state, like you said yourself, right? Maybe they're not gone, but they just can't access and you can't do the thumbprint or the face facial recognition. Access will be denied to those accounts.

So then is there a legal way to get into those, or do you have to set up that access ahead of time? So the access needs to be set up ahead of time. So we'll just focus on the phone right now, right? Because we can talk about other things, but let's just focus on the phone since that's just a big part of our lives. My recommendation always is Apple, so Apple phones, the iOS application, Apple did create what they call a legacy contact.

So for those that hold an Apple phone, you can actually go in and into your settings and you're going to search for legacy contact, and that will enable you to add people to your legacies. So if something does happen, that legacy person will receive a QR code, right? That image that has like the coded image that people aren't familiar with QR codes. So the people you put on your legacy list through Apple will receive a legacy code.

My recommendation is that you not just put it in your, you want to print it. You want to create a hard copy of that legacy code and put it with all of your like end of life documentation. If you have a will, take that legacy code, print it, and put it with your will, your living will, your trust, whatever your, what I call the crucial doc box, right? That document, that box that you need in case of.

For those of us, and I am an Android user, for those of us that have Androids right now, it's a little more complicated. Android has not created yet an easy accessible legacy contact account. So for us Android users, we have to go into our account on Google and into myaccount.google.com. And then we need to go into our data privacy.

It's called data and privacy. And then we need to actually do several steps in order to set up and inactivate that account. But that inactivation won't happen until after someone's gone.

So it's like, you know, it's the chicken or the egg, but in a very challenging way, as we're talking today, which is, you know, in July of 2024, they have not, meaning they, those developers, the app platforms, these technology companies, they haven't really dug into this death and dying. What do we do when? It's a sensitive topic, and they're just not sure how to do it. It's also sensitive from a legal standpoint.

I've heard many stories of people who have had to go to court to be able to access their loved ones, or not even their loved ones, you know, if there's an executor, a legal executor, to be able to access their technology in order to gain access to other banking accounts. They've had to go to court, meaning how to pay lawyers, how to get special. And there are digital access specialists out there.

So now you're going to have to pay a consultant to go in and basically hack a phone in order to access those databases and security access. Well, can't they just go to the brick and mortar bank with the death certificate and say, you know, someone says, dad, here's the proof of that. So the, so a couple of things there.

One is, yes, you can with the, with, if you're going, if we're going to talk about a bank account, so a bank account, yes, of course you can, you know, you have to wait for, for the death certificates, conversation around probate, right? So some of those bank accounts might need to wait to go through probate. But what if it's, it's a, what if it's a joint account or maybe not a joint account, but maybe the person is more the executor of an account for a child, for example. Or even just, I have a challenge right now where I have a client who the husband died and he had all the passwords to their Comcast, their Ruko, all of their Netflix, all of their digital digital accounts, and she's not able to get into it because of the multi-factor authentication that was on his phone.

So one thing I always recommend is if you are in partnership with somebody is old school, write down the passwords, just on a piece of paper in a secured area, you write down the passwords, you let each other, there's a trust factor, so it's letting each other know what each other's password is on your phones is very important. So that's a conversation that we need to have. But what if it's a child, what if it's a, you know, a young adult and they are in college and something happens to them, their phone dies with you.

The parent getting access to that would be very challenging as well. And I'm sure a lot of the kids are not sharing their passwords. So this is, it's kind of a bit of a black hole and that's why I really want to have this conversation because I want people to be aware of, you're carrying your phone, we're carrying around a very powerful piece of, a device that holds a lot of our information in there.

Probably, our phones probably hold more information than any other device or, what do I say, the file cabinet or any other place. It holds our biostats, it holds, it tracks where we've been driving, our text messages, our email messages, our voicemail messages, our phone can track everything. So in order to access it, we need to have that backup plan.

And my recommendation always is that backup plan should be a handwritten, you know, secure place where you're going to put your information. So let me ask you this question, Marianne, where do you, if you're in a car accident, where do you keep your in case of emergency contacts? In my phone. And it's under what, and you have it written under what? Well, I have an Apple, and so it has an emergency contact kind of, I want to say thing, which makes me sound very unintelligent, but they have an emergency contact start.

A field, right, right, a function, they have a functionality, an enablement, an enablement in order to, I think they call it ICE, right? So in case of emergency ICE. Yeah, so I've got my husband, my kids, and my doctor listed under the in case of emergency thing. Okay, so you, I'm going to turn back the clock, because we're around the same generation.

Back in the early 80s and 90s, when we were driving, and there was no cell phone, let me ask you the same question. Where did you keep your emergency contacts? God, back then, I don't, I think they would probably look in the glove box, figure out what my address was, drive up to your house and knock on the door, right? And that's my recommendation. So in this digital world, yes, technology, we are embedded with it, we're, you know, reaching this level of singularity, but at the same time, writing it down on paper.

So I always recommend to my clients that in case of emergency, I have a, it just looks like a business size card. And on that business size card, I have, in case of emergency, I keep one in my wallet and one next to my car registration in the glove compartment, because in case of emergency, if EMS got called, and I'm unresponsive, and my phone is not available, because they don't know the password, EMS would be able to find my three contacts, my medical and my legal contacts, five contacts on that card. So that won't delay my being cared for.

And then if there's any other professionals that need to be contacted, and I put three numbers on there, because nowadays, people aren't going to pick up a, if they don't recognize the number, they're not going to pick up the phone, right? Exactly. Can't you just see that scenario is, you know, people calling your kids, and they're like, I don't know who this is, if they want to talk, and they don't listen to voicemail anymore. And you could be, you know, decomposing somewhere, and it's like, I don't know where she is.

Nobody's called. I haven't heard from her. It is.

It is. I mean, we, so we just, my husband and I just had a dear friend pass away two weeks ago from a heart attack. And he was 70 years old, had a heart condition, but still, 70 is very young and unexpected.

We realized that there was a problem, because Dave, everyone would text Dave all day long, and Dave was very responsive in his texts. We sent him a, you know, either on Facebook, or on Insta, or any of those, and he would be very responsive. Well, lo and behold, he passed away at 11 o'clock at night, 1130 at night.

And by around 12 o'clock in the afternoon, there was like a buzz between all of his peeps. Hey, have you heard from Dave? I haven't heard from Dave. What's going on with Dave? And then all of a sudden, there was this escalated urgency, because he wasn't responding on his phone.

So from that, you know, the phone chain started, and then we were able to unfortunately find him at home. And so again, it was, the phone can be friend or foe. So we want to be looking at it both as, you know, with respect, and at the same time, go back to some of those basics, start writing things down, share, you know, I had a conversation with a couple not too long ago, and it was interesting that the husband knew the wife's passwords and her social security number and all of her needed biomedical stuff, but she did not know any of his.

She didn't know how to get into his phone, she didn't know his social security number, any of those things. So if the wife died tomorrow, the husband, as painful as would be from an emotional standpoint, he wouldn't be, he'd be able to move through the process of getting the things in order. However, for the wife, it was reversed if the husband left, because she doesn't have access to his phone, because she doesn't know where all the bank accounts are, because she's never filed the taxes before, even those pieces.

Wow. It's just like, the old days of the 50s, where, you know, the man did the stuff and the woman, you know, just let him and then when, you know, you'd hear those stories about when the men would die, the woman would be like, I don't even know how to pay the bill, you know. Now add that scenario, whether it's male or female, right, but add that scenario with the complexity of the digital, managing digital assets.

That just sounds like an absolute nightmare. And for some people it has been. So I'm really surprised to hear you say, kind of go old school and write stuff down, because in my years of working with the VA or in, you know, other jobs, they'd say, do not write your passwords down.

And nowadays, they have you change your passwords, excuse me, like every month. And you can't repeat them, you know, in a quarterly cycle. And I'm like, seriously, if I don't write them down, how the heck am I supposed to remember them? So I have a password book that I write my stuff down, but I've always felt really guilty, Nikki, writing it down, because I've been told, don't ever do that.

So we're going back old school, pencil, paper. We are, you know, and you bring up a really good point, which is that the way the technology is evolving right now, we have to be, I'm going to use a very project management terminology, we have to be very agile. So things are changing, they're going to continue to change.

It is going that how we do things today is going to be very different from tomorrow. So my prediction is, so yeah, no, three or four years ago, they're like, do not write your password down, do not keep it anywhere. Now, because of what you just said, that the passwords are changing so quickly, unless you have a digital, what we call password manager, which is, there are several companies out there that provide that and even that's not 100% safe, they've been hacked as well.

My recommendation today is write it down, but invest in a fireproof, waterproof file box, fireproof, waterproof file box. So you can get it, you know, Amazon, Walmart, anywhere, but so when you say, so I'll ask you not that you need, you know, not to share any secrets, but I'm curious, like, hush, you wrote it down. Where did you put it? Like in the old days, we used to, remember, we used to, under our keyboard, we would have like a C-note, where'd mom put that in password, like, yeah, the C-notes aren't big enough anymore because I literally have a whole book with all, everything has a password now.

And then, you know, and then I also have one of those, you know, this, what's called sticky password, the thing where you can put in your passwords and hold onto them. But even that, sometimes I'll go to log in, it just happened to me now before I was talking to you, I was going to log in and it's like, okay, sticky password, wake up and fill in this password. Well, it didn't.

I had to go to my book, open it up and say, okay, let's hope to God I have the most current one in there so I can get into the thing I'm trying to get into. So it's, I don't know, is it just me? No, and I just, I don't want to overwhelm you or your audience. I mean, this is, I go down the rabbit hole here.

So if I go too deep down the rabbit hole, please pull me out. So with that said, with the advancement of AI and blockchain and soon quantum computing, the way we are managing our access is going to change very quickly in the next few years. I don't know what that's going to look like yet.

I am, I know, you know, working in the blockchain community that they are trying to find applications that, because of what you're saying, a safe password, they're saying, remember in the old days, like if you just did, okay, my password is password 123, right? Or my dog's name, 123. That's unsafe. They're saying, I think it was three years ago, the minimum they said was five characters.

And then it was eight characters. And now it is 15 characters to ensure that your password cannot be hacked. And I would say again, not to go down the rabbit hole too deep for your folks, but what I'm envisioning is probably again, two to three years, it's not going to be that long because the AI applications are coming fast and furious.

I'm envisioning that we will reach a point where we will all have our own, we have our social security number, even that's hacked right now, right? I mean, our social security number is on the dark web and who knows how many people have access to it, but I'm guessing, not to throw out some of the buzzwords like zero knowledge proof, but there will be technology that instead of using our social security number that's in our head, that we will have like a personalized lifelong QR code. And that will be captured on our wrist or something. Well, you know, I'm not sure.

There was a movie with Timber, with Timberlake, he was in that movie, Timeless or something. Not to get too sci-fi, but there will be some sort of access, whether on our phones or some sort of identity that will be extremely unique to us and unhackable. Unfortunately, right now we're in that in-between phase.

We're between old school, new school, right? And so that's why I said best practice, do both. Yeah. Well, that's really, you know, that's really good advice.

And for people who have your Apple phone, go to your legacy contact and do that, because I didn't even know that that was there. I know Facebook, you can do a legacy contact there. And I don't know if some of the other ones.

Meta. Yeah. I mean, basically you look at meta, right? So Facebook is meta.

So meta would include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. That's all meta. LinkedIn, I have to check, right? So it would just, you know, your social media.

Now, one piece of advice I do give nowadays is just as we have, and I know you've spoken about medical advance directives. My recommendation is to create a digital legacy advance directive. Which would be a medical document.

Go ahead. I was just going to say, and that is probably a whole separate show that we should interview that we should do, because that can get complicated. And I've been personally in a situation where a very good friend died and her daughter asked me to go through her computer.

And I'm so glad I did, because there were things in there I'm sure she wouldn't have wanted. I mean, for a fact, she wouldn't want her daughter to see. And I went through and, you know, deleted that stuff before her daughter went in and did whatever she was going to do.

So, you know, you think about, for those of you who save porn or whatever it is that you save, you know, do you really want other people to see that stuff? And so you really need to have somebody to go in who's going to kind of look at stuff. Is that what you're talking about, Nikki? Absolutely. When it comes to, you know, just that database management.

I asked a friend when we were having this exact conversation, and I asked her, you know, what would happen? She said she has probably over 10,000 pictures in her phone. And it's just, why? Right? I mean, if you have, it is about that management and how to do that database management. Right now, it's, unless you're a computer scientist, it is challenging.

It's really hard to, because the volume of digital assets that we all own today, there's no easy way to manage it. Unless we spend our whole day, I mean, look at our inbox in our email inbox. It's time consuming.

So is your best advice, at least to get started for people to get that QR code for doing your legacy contact, writing your stuff down, share if you're in a partnered relationship. And then I'm thinking about, you know, the people who have extramarital affairs and things that they don't want their partner to be able to get into their phone to know about. So then you got to clean up your act in that way.

Right. Like I said, it is, it is our phone is my goal of this conversation is just to let people know, like this is a bigger nut than you might be thinking about. And if I can just bring a little bit of awareness, people might be more thoughtful about what they are accessing, downloading, storing.

How are they going to share it? And if they're listening to this podcast, then they certainly have an interest in what happens because everyone dies. Yeah. And on that note, Nikki, thank you so much for talking with us today.

And I really hope our listeners are going to take this to heart and kind of do some digital management of their own. So Nikki, thank you. Good start.

Yeah. You bet. Thanks for the opportunity.

And that's it for this week's episode. Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies. And thank you for listening.

This is Charlie Navarette. And from the television series, Doc Martin, we're all going to die. It's just getting used to the idea.

And I'm Marianne Matzo. And we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift.

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