Digital Hygiene: Your Responsibility as a Parent
I don’t have kids, but I hear that it’s a rather large responsibility. When a child turns eighteen and is recognized as an adult, many parents consider their responsibility coming to an end as they don’t have to legally house or feed them. For parents with the means to provide more, this is Economy flight parenting.
Slightly more advanced is when parents consider their kid’s long term. Parents classically think about funding education. Further down the line: estate planning. Power of Attorney, Wills, Trusts and Other Legal Shit. This mitigates the impact from taxes, shields the family from strife over ambiguous assets, and saves them time and pain once you’re finished earning money (read: because you’re dead).
By the same logic, having some digital hygiene, such as accessibility to your digital life, will help your family once you’re gone.
How often does this not happen? Well, enough for Google to highlight it here:
“We recognize that many people pass away without leaving clear instructions about how to manage their online accounts.” - Google Support
Reminder: you will die
After putting in serious hours on the actuarial tables, I’m here to share that you’re probably going to die some day [1]. And statistically speaking, that death may not be when you hoped or planned for.
When you become a senior fellow, you’re coin flipping on whether you’ll make it to 85.
So what happens when you unexpectedly die?
Library books don’t need to be returned.
You no longer have to manage your carb intake.
And unless you planned for it, your family can’t easily access your digital life.
What if your kids don’t have access to any of the written memoirs on your computer? Or have the ability to show any photos at your funeral? Or access to distant relatives' email addresses? This is akin to the family home burning down and you losing all of the photo albums.
Basic digital hygiene is password management
Just like you wouldn’t skip showers for years, you should have good digital habits. In addition to those behaviors, solid tools can help you to stay on track and even give feedback on when you’re beginning to stink a bit. We’ll focus on the Really Important Stuff, leaving your desktop folder organization and file naming conventions for another day.
Ah yes, I recall my days of not using a password manager fondly. The whimsical, carefree cycling of my 4 core passwords over hundreds of accounts and services. The efficiency of only having to remember one password. And the ensuing freakout when someone cracked my UberEats account, ordering £335.85 worth of Oreo milkshakes in London.
Fuck! They really like milkshakes.
But since we’re more interested in your failings as a parent than my past missteps: not having your passwords organized can result in your kids potentially being locked out of hardware and services. And we already established that you’re dyin’, pal, we should explore how to manage our account access a little better.
Enter, password managers. They’re an incredibly handy tool to help store all of your passwords in a place which has one very secure key. It might sound like having one password for everything, but this opens you up to significant risk evidenced by the many database hacks & password dumps happening. This works fine most of the time, and as I’ve shared, you’re buying milkshakes across the pond when it doesn’t.
The great news is setting up this service is very easy. Once you do that, you can decide to share your master password with a trusted person. This means they can access your accounts if you’re not around to do that yourself.
Getting more advanced
With respect to digital hygiene, most of the impact will come from the above. You can always extend this by centralizing further in particular services and adding even more security to how you share your master password. Some other ideas after you tackle the basics.
Photos. I take a lot of photos which are a more accurate representation of me than my Instagram. Keeping every photo I take synced to iCloud makes consolidating easy going forward and I’ve uploaded my old photos from hard drives into the same account. Here comes the Morbid Express once again: if people want to grieve you, they might want to access your photos. Choo choo!
Notes. After reading an article on my grandfather who died before I was born, I realize that someone might want to read more about me when I’m gone. As such, I’m an advocate of digitizing your notes and centralizing those. As someone who used to not backup notes to a service like Google Docs, losing these is the equivalent of losing journals.
More security. In terms of transferring a key, a friend shared the idea of carving the master password into a piece of wood, breaking it into parts, and one of each of those parts to a friend. This may be a bit spycraft for some, but gives another layer of security.
Preserve your meaning
Nobody likes responsibility being hoisted upon them (see: taxes), especially at an older age. But to not prepare for the inevitable could hurt those around you. Don’t make them responsible for cleaning up your digital messes, and instead give future generations a glimpse into who you were and why you mattered.
“Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” - Ernest Hemingway
References & Notes