<story><title>Ask HN: Have you set up a procedure to disclose your passwords in case of death?</title><text>After coming back from my home country where the insecurity is a big part of the daily life (armed robbery, kidnapping, murder), I started thinking of what would happen if something happened to me and how would I be able to ease the burden on my love ones to manage my digital assets (cancel subscriptions, keep my digital libraries, etc). So I ask: do you have a procedure in place to grant or transfer access in case of death?&lt;p&gt;My first idea would be using a password manager for everything, list every device used for 2SA and confine within my will a master password.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>NamTaf</author><text>No.&lt;p&gt;Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. You can cause problems if you subvert them, as there&amp;#x27;s processes to go through to prove who might have claim to the estate and if necessary divide it between multiple parties. Similarly, subscriptions will just bounce once you inform the banks of the death and they freeze further transactions as part of said process. In my experience, your next of kin don&amp;#x27;t want to be dealing with cancelling a bunch of subscriptions when they&amp;#x27;re already planning your funeral, informing loved ones, etc. - there&amp;#x27;s already heaps of shit you have to consider and it&amp;#x27;s a very stressful, emotional time.&lt;p&gt;Giving over passwords implies that you expect someone to log in and do something with them, so it&amp;#x27;s not really important for them to have it for these reasons.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I doubt any of my next of kin care about e.g. my Steam library or my Reddit account. As I&amp;#x27;ve gotten older, I&amp;#x27;ve realised that people don&amp;#x27;t really want to inherit the overwhelming majority of your stuff (they have their own stuff). If you think someone really does want something in particular, you can have that conversation with them specifically, but that&amp;#x27;s going to be very few and far between.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgbmtl</author><text>In the early COVID days, a friend got really sick and then in a comma for 4 weeks, followed by a few weeks where he couldn&amp;#x27;t talk.&lt;p&gt;His wife, who also helped with running his business (small shop, 4 employees), tried to get access to the business bank account in order to pay the bills. Cloud services would expire, services shutdown, they would lose a lot of clients.&lt;p&gt;She couldn&amp;#x27;t pay the bills, because while she was his next of kin, that only works if he dies.&lt;p&gt;So anyway, having procedures for death is one thing, but don&amp;#x27;t forget scenarios like being in a coma for a few weeks, or being kidnapped, etc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Have you set up a procedure to disclose your passwords in case of death?</title><text>After coming back from my home country where the insecurity is a big part of the daily life (armed robbery, kidnapping, murder), I started thinking of what would happen if something happened to me and how would I be able to ease the burden on my love ones to manage my digital assets (cancel subscriptions, keep my digital libraries, etc). So I ask: do you have a procedure in place to grant or transfer access in case of death?&lt;p&gt;My first idea would be using a password manager for everything, list every device used for 2SA and confine within my will a master password.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>NamTaf</author><text>No.&lt;p&gt;Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. You can cause problems if you subvert them, as there&amp;#x27;s processes to go through to prove who might have claim to the estate and if necessary divide it between multiple parties. Similarly, subscriptions will just bounce once you inform the banks of the death and they freeze further transactions as part of said process. In my experience, your next of kin don&amp;#x27;t want to be dealing with cancelling a bunch of subscriptions when they&amp;#x27;re already planning your funeral, informing loved ones, etc. - there&amp;#x27;s already heaps of shit you have to consider and it&amp;#x27;s a very stressful, emotional time.&lt;p&gt;Giving over passwords implies that you expect someone to log in and do something with them, so it&amp;#x27;s not really important for them to have it for these reasons.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I doubt any of my next of kin care about e.g. my Steam library or my Reddit account. As I&amp;#x27;ve gotten older, I&amp;#x27;ve realised that people don&amp;#x27;t really want to inherit the overwhelming majority of your stuff (they have their own stuff). If you think someone really does want something in particular, you can have that conversation with them specifically, but that&amp;#x27;s going to be very few and far between.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmathai</author><text>In case of my death, I want to make it as easy as possible for my wife to carry on. Having access to our accounts (which I mostly manage) so she can do whatever she needs is a lot more important than the well-established processes you mentioned. Those processes would have gone to her anyway.&lt;p&gt;If we both die, then our extended family will have to work through the legal system but our will + a lawyer should help out a lot.&lt;p&gt;Edit: To answer the original question - I documented how my wife could do this before going on a week long motorcycle ride in 2019 :).</text></comment>