An new and ever-so-slightly morbid online venture known as Legacy Locker has been launched that will automatically put your online affairs in order when you finally, and inevitably, kick the bucket.
With every passing year it seems that our lives become more and more entangled with the online space. We make friends, we send emails to business connections, we sign up for porn sites we desperately hope nobody else will ever find out about, yet very rarely do we ever consider what happens to all this stuff when we buy the farm. Who will tell our chat buddies? Who will post a notice on our Facebook site? Who will send that email to the police, the Governor and the press admitting that you knew about the assault rifles in the garden shed but kept your mouth shut because the Mala Noche threatened to kill you if you came forward, but now that they’ve betrayed you it’s time for the truth to come out and justice to be served?
Legacy Locker, a San Francisco-based startup, aims to fulfill that need. Users who sign up for the service can place online assets into a virtual “locker,” which will then be passed on to a person of your choosing in the event of your untimely demise. Everything from online bank accounts to social network logins can be included and the company also offers “Legacy Letters” which lets people send a last-chance goodbye to online friends. (Or, I suppose, a last-chance “up yours” to online enemies.)
David Speiser of Legacy Locker says the company offers “bank level security” for any assets it holds and death reports must be confirmed by “human intervention,” including the receipt of physical death certificate, before any material is released. The company’s target market is U.S. families with kids under the age of 18 who already have wills in place, which Speiser said adds up to roughly 12.6 million households in total.
The only downside to the service is the expense: Legacy Locker costs $29.99 per year or, for those of you who don’t plan on croaking anytime soon, $299.99 for a lifetime membership. A free trial account, with a limited number of assets and beneficiaries, is also available but detailed limitations are not yet listed. The Legacy Locker website is live but the service won’t actually be operational until April.
Want to reach out from beyond the grave to tell your Warcraft guildmates how much you actually despise them all but don’t trust your flesh-and-blood relatives to do the job properly? Maybe Legacy Locker is for you.
Source: VentureBeat
Published: Mar 10, 2009 04:57 pm