Questions and answers about digital heritage (FAQ)

General questions about the

digital legacy

Questions around the

Management of the digital estate

Questions about

memoresa

General questions about the digital legacy

Digital heritage, what is that?

Over 90% of the population is on the move in the digital world. Even those who are not in social networks or virtually socialize on the Internet leave digital traces in another form. The data that remains on the Internet after death is the digital heritage.

What belongs to the digital legacy?

Digital heritage includes offline data and files on devices, websites, online communications, digital goods, social networks and more.

Offline data: self-generated documents, images, videos and audio files, presentations
Websites: domain, internet presence, online shop, blog
Communication online / offline: Correspondence, e-mail accounts, mailboxes server, mailboxes offline, information in clouds
Digital goods: copyrights (music, word, image), software licences, purchased music, films, texts, e-books
Social networks and chat services: Facebook, Google +, Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Skype, Facetime, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube
Shopping and payment accounts: Online banking, online payment systems like Pay-Pal, online shops like Amazon or eBay
Dating and partner portals like Tinder, Badoo, Lovoo, JoyClub and others.
Insurances of all kinds
Subscriptions, newspapers, contracts of all kinds such as mobile phone, internet, telephone

Why should I care about my digital legacy?

An unwanted digital legacy not only creates emotional unease among the bereaved who have to take care of the administration. It can also provide opportunities for abuse and fraud. Digital data theft does not stop at the data of the deceased. It can result in high costs and legal disputes, which will continue to affect the surviving dependents for years to come.

In addition, most current contracts such as subscriptions, mobile phone contracts, memberships and insurance policies remain as a legacy for the survivors, who have to pay for the running costs.

If the contracts remain undetected, high costs can quickly arise due to monthly obligations.

In addition, monetary legacies are often not found or recognized. Acquired rights of use, patents, certificates, intellectual property rights, royalties, building society contracts and other insurance benefits are just a few examples of these legacies.

Last but not least, many people will feel better in their lifetime if their memberships of partner exchanges, dating sites or other service providers that can be assigned to the most personal areas of life remain undiscovered post mortem.

Is my digital data automatically deleted after death?

Your heirs will inherit your digital estate and must decide what to do with it. Often they have hardly the possibility to trace these digital traces and to eliminate them extensively. It can happen that your digital data remain in numerous databases for an indefinite period of time and appear in good time.

How can I prevent certain data from being inherited?

You can prevent certain data from being inherited by determining during your lifetime what happens to them after you die. You can find more information here.

What can my heirs do with my data?

What can my heirs do with my data? if the digital estate passes to your heirs, they will have access to all your data and can decide freely how to handle it. You can prevent this by taking precautions and managing your digital heritage.

Can I forbid that my heirs have access to my personal data?

By creating a power of attorney you can prevent your heirs from having control over your data. Memoresa can implement your last will and take care of deletions of accounts, accounts and contracts.

Management platform for digital documents: How secure is that?

With memoresa you can be sure that your data is encrypted and stored on a server in Germany. Furthermore your virtual cloud storage is protected by a firewall.
You can find more information here: Security.

Erasing digital heritage and erasing digital traces: How do I do that?

After you have recorded where you leave digital traces, you can use a power of attorney to determine what happens to your accounts and data: For each track individually or for all tracks together – you decide.

Questions concerning the management of the digital heritage

How can I manage my digital heritage?

There are several possibilities:

The approach that should lead to legal certainty in the regulation of digital inheritance during one’s lifetime and afterwards is offered by some legal expenses insurers in the form of legal advice. The implementation of the necessary precautions remains with the testator, which can lead to errors.

Offers by some external service providers to store access data and online accounts during lifetimes and hand them over to designated persons for further administration after death do not offer a sensible solution. In addition, the transfer of access data to third parties involves unmanageable risks.

For this reason, we have created memoresa: an online platform where you can manage your digital data easily, quickly and without complications and decide for yourself what happens to them after your death. Here you can decide with whom you share what and who should take care of which parts of your digital heritage. Do you want your Tinder account to be anonymously deleted, so that neither family nor friends have to worry about it? Memoresa will gladly take care of it for you.

How can I manage my digital heritage digitally?

On memoresa we offer you the possibility to store your documents digitally, manage them and adapt them at any time. Registration is free of charge, so you can look at everything at your leisure and decide the best way to manage your digital estate.

Can I record my digital estate in my will?

Wills rarely deal with the digital heritage that needs to be managed after death.

Probate administrators hardly have the possibility to record and keep this legacy up-to-date in order to arrange for a structured, extensive and careful processing in the interest of the deceased and his surviving dependants.

Very few want to deal with the legal areas of personal rights (post-mortem), data protection law, rights of third parties, telemedia law and copyright in order to guarantee legal security for the heirs. In addition, the administration of digital heritage via a will would involve high costs and time.

How do I create a digital will?

At memoresa you can arrange each of your affairs individually and create a power of attorney. The entirety of the regulations results in your digital will.

How do I ensure that my digital administration is up to date despite changes in the law?

At memoresa, your stored powers of attorney are regularly checked for validity and topicality during the current contract. We will inform you if there are any changes in the law that affect your digital estate administration and make adjustments necessary.

Questions about memoresa

Digital inheritance service: What is included in the memoresa offers?

memoresa offers you three packages to manage your digital estate. You can find more information in the comparison table: Comparison table.

What functions does memoresa offer to manage my digital heritage?

Memoresa guides you systematically, purposefully and thoroughly through all areas of your digital life where you leave digital traces:

websites: domain, internet presence, online shop, blog
Communication online / offline: Correspondence, e-mail accounts, mailboxes server, mailboxes offline, information in clouds
Digital goods: copyrights (music, word, image), software licenses, purchased music, films, texts, e-books
Social networks and chat services
Shopping and payment accounts
Dating and partner portals
Insurance and contracts, memberships, subscriptions
After the inventory is taken, Memoresa generates a power of attorney. The power of attorney is used to determine by decree how the digital legacy is to be dealt with after death.

This power of attorney, together with the corresponding decree, is deposited with the central register of wills. This ensures that after your death all regulations come into force as you determined them during your lifetime.

Memoresa is automatically informed of the death and initiates the implementation of your powers of attorney.

How secure is the memoresa cloud?

We have set up extensive technical security measures so that your memoresa cloud storage is as secure as possible and only accessible to those you grant access to. Sensitive data like passwords are not stored. You can find more information here: Security.

Digital inheritance checklist: Does memoresa offer me a checklist?

Memoresa offers you much more than a checklist for managing your digital estate: In simple steps, you will be systematically guided through a digital filing system, so that you can create a thorough inventory of your current contracts, subscriptions, insurance policies, etc. This makes checklists for managing your digital estate obsolete.

What happens to my data when I cancel memoresa?

The data and powers of attorney deposited with memoresa will be handed over to you as a data record and in paper form. We make sure that under no circumstances will you suddenly be left without a planned inheritance. Your memoresa account will then be deleted until you log in again.

How do you find out about my death? What happens when I die?

There are four possible ways in which the client can set up the determination of death:

The client can instruct a trusted person to inform memoresa of the death. This is free of charge, but also unsafe. The person must not forget to contact us. This person must immediately send the death certificate to us as proof after your death, but will certainly want to grieve first.
If the client wants to deposit a will with the notary, the sentence must be added there that memoresa should be informed of the decease. This costs nothing extra over and above the notary’s normal fees. In this way, however, we will certainly be automatically informed of the death by the probate court within 3 days.
Similar to a notary, we can file information about the client with the probate court. This costs a one-time fee from the court, but we are sure to be informed within 3 days and the client does not need to go to a notary. This also works if the client has already deposited a will.
The client can create a handwritten will and supplement it with our text and file it with the probate court. Then the fees at the probate court are only due once.
Costs nothing, but is also unsafe.
Costs the notary fees, which are incurred by a notary for the will anyway.
Costs € 99, which includes the fees of the notarial register of wills. These costs are included in the lifetime package.

Sensitive data such as passwords are not stored. However, passwords are required for logging in to all online accounts. How is this sensitive data stored and shared ONLY for an authorised representative?

Our original intention was to be able to delete an account or cancel an insurance policy etc. on the basis of a power of attorney granted by the customer. For this, we only need the user name or the contract number – passwords are not necessary.

However, there is an increasing demand for the storage of passwords, which is why we integrate existing password safes such as securesafe.ch or avira. To make it as secure as possible, we recommend that users write down the master password for the password safe on a piece of paper, leave it in a safe place at home and leave it with the trusted person in a farewell message via memoresa. This maximum level of security thus ensured has two positive consequences: the hurdle for users to store passwords on the internet is very high – we reduce this hurdle. Secondly, we are not such an important target for hackers if we ‘only’ manage powers of attorney in the event of the user’s death.

Where is the data stored? Is everything even secured according to the GDPR?

The data is stored exclusively on AWS servers in Frankfurt am Main – it never leaves Germany.

DSGVO and data protection are not just empty words for us, we live it. In this video, Dr Anna-Lena Hoffman, who has a PhD in data protection and is part of our team, and Jörg Schädlich, one of our co-founders, show you how a startup with an internet platform solves the storage and processing of sensitive personal data under the GDPR.

Can the documents that are stored, for example, as PDF files in the encrypted cloud also be versioned?

We have planned versioning, but have not yet implemented it.

How secure is the access of the files by hackers in general and by unauthorised access of the files also by internals themselves?

We regularly have ourselves hacked by an external professional security company. We implement the findings directly.

So far, we have only had one worse vulnerability, which we had repaired within 2 hours.

Within our company, there are only 3 people who are even able to access the documents. Since we have to work with these documents after the death of a client, we cannot file them in such a way that we cannot get to them ourselves.

Can encrypted files also be stored?

Yes, you can. You can store documents and these can be all file types that you would like to use. In one of the next versions, we are working on supporting the encryption of a file directly in the portal.