Sorting Out Your Online Life Before Someone Else Has To
A guide to using Trace: Plan Ahead, for anyone getting their own digital affairs in order
Your executor will start with your email. It is usually the only door they can find.
From there they guess. Which subscriptions are still charging. Which photographs you would have wanted printed. Which accounts matter, and which are a 2013 sign-up for a single purchase, never opened again.
Most people have far more accounts than they could list from memory. The obvious ones, then everything underneath. A photo library going back fifteen years. Cloud storage holding the only copy of something. A forum account you have not thought about since you made it.
None of it closes itself. And the only person who knows what any of it means is you.
Trace: Plan Ahead is a free tool for writing that down. What you have online, what you want done with it, and where the keys are kept. It runs in your browser. There is no account to create and nothing is sent anywhere.
It never asks for a password
Not one. That is deliberate, and it is what makes this different from most of what else is out there.
A written list of your passwords is a security problem while you are alive and a liability for your estate afterwards. It also goes stale. Passwords change, and within a year half the list is wrong, which is worse than having no list at all, because people trust it and lose weeks finding out.
What lasts is the system, not the keys.
So the tool asks a different question. Not what your password is, but where someone would find it. A master password in a fire safe. A sealed envelope with your solicitor. A password manager with an emergency contact already nominated. That answer is still true in five years.
What it covers
Six steps. Work through them in any order, over as many sittings as you like. It saves as you go.
The part most people have never heard of
Google, Apple and Facebook will all let you nominate someone in advance.
You choose the person now, from inside your own account settings. When the time comes, they get access without a court order, a death certificate, or eight months of arguing with a support queue.
Google calls it Inactive Account Manager. Apple calls it a Legacy Contact. Facebook calls it memorialisation settings. All three are buried several menus deep and none of them are advertised. Between them they cover your email, your photographs, your files and your social profile.
Setting all three up takes about ten minutes.
Step 2 of the tool walks through each one. If you do nothing else, do that.
Before you begin
None of this is essential. Start without it if you would rather.
What to expect
You will remember accounts halfway through that you have not thought about in a decade. You will probably also find at least one subscription still charging you for something you stopped using.
The goal is not a complete record. It is a workable one. Even a partial list, with a named person and a note about where the master password is kept, turns a months-long search into an afternoon of admin.
At the end, print it. Store it with your will, or wherever your important papers live. Do not email it to yourself, and do not keep the only copy inside the cloud account it explains how to open.
For doulas, advisers, and anyone helping someone else
The tool is built to be handed to a client and worked through together, or given to someone to do alone at their own pace. The instructions at each step assume no technical background.
The most useful thing you can do before someone starts is separate the two jobs in their mind. Listing accounts is admin, and it can be done slowly, over weeks. Deciding what happens to the photographs is not admin.
That one is worth sitting with.
Samara McIlroy 