Create Your Digital Will
Be Kind To Your Loved Ones
4 min readAug 11, 2024
Whether we like it or not, our lives are hugely digital. For most of us, we are online from the moment we wake up to the moment our head hits the pillow. And all that digital living creates digital exhaust — an online trail of breadcrumbs that reveals who we are (or were), what we do, what we like. If you want to watch a great talk about this, check out Lilly Ryan’s 2018 (yes, 2018) Usenix presentation: Rage Against The Ghost In The Machine
Think about your digital footprint… go on, do it. Just for fun. Make a list of all the digital things you have (or have ever had that you’ve let linger in digital purgatory). Here are some of mine, to get you thinking:
- Email/calendar/to-do/etc.
- Social media (Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, etc.)
- Online finance stuff (banks, investments, venmo, taxes, etc.)
- Slack/Discord/Reddit chat chat chat channels
- Personal website
- Cloud storage
- Blog stuff and writing apps
- Contact apps (address books, CRMs, etc.)
- Health apps
- Browser history
- Photos and scans
- Password vaults and other login paraphenalia
