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HARI SREENIVASAN: Do you have an email account? How about a Facebook page? Bank online? Shop online? Pay your gas, light, or cable TV bill over the internet?

I've just laid out more than a half dozen accounts that many of us have, likely each with its own password.

These accounts don't die with us. The passwords to each of them, are often times locked away with only one person—the deceased. Which means that valuable online assets could be lost forever—or be found by those looking to exploit them.

Take the case of Glenn Williamson, a tech entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon. In August of 2012, he got the worst news possible.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: I was in the Philippines speaking at a conference and, you know, when your phone goes off 15 times and it's 3:00 in the morning in the United States, you have a bad feeling. You know it's not a good call.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Glenn's 73-year old mother, Lee, had died. As her fiduciary and as a 25-year veteran of the tech world, it fell to him to manage her online accounts.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: I knew my mom, being a cool grandma, was on Twitter. So, I knew she was on Twitter and I knew she had a Yahoo account, so we had a baseline to start, but that's all we knew.

HARI SREENIVASAN: After 20 hours of searching, Glenn found 13 different accounts belonging to his mother, including email, social media, and shopping accounts.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: So we broke it down into categories: travel, sentimental value, security, and basically we searched on about 75 different sites

HARI SREENIVASAN: Some had real value.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: We got to United, and United did indeed have my mom as a customer and there was 54,000 miles that we were able to retrieve for our family.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All this while he was grieving.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: And it's a painful, it's a long process, and everybody means well, but if one more person tells you they're sorry—it's like, okay, I just need to know, did she have an account or not.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Williamson and his wife are online savvy, relatively young and it was still tough to find all those accounts.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: So, the average person, especially if the average person is doing it in their 60's, it's a very, very difficult process.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Glenn's problems managing his mother's online estate helped inspire him to start a business solution called “WebCease”—an online service that helps people search for their deceased loved ones' digital assets.

It uses a person's basic information—like an email address—and finds the major online accounts that are linked to it. And although WebCease won't shut down an account for you, it will tell you what can be done under a website's specific terms-of-service.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: My mom had an asset inventory of her financial accounts. But she didn't have an asset inventory of all things digital, and that's really what we provide to the family, is we provide them at—a high level—a digital asset inventory. So, you can look through it and say, “Oh, my mom was on Amazon and she had iTunes and Marriott and Hyatt, etcetera.” So, that's really the value we provide.

HARI SREENIVASAN: WebCease is one of a handful of websites that has sprung up over the last few years—sites like Navigatr, the Doc Safe, Capsoole, My Cyber safe, and Afternote—all of them trying to tackle what is becoming an increasingly common problem.

SUZANNE WALSH: Nowadays, everyone keeps their filing cabinets on their computers and they may not have shared the access to that with their families.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Suzanne Walsh is an estate lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut.

SUZANNE WALSH: I have received panicked calls from family members who don't know passwords, don't know the nature of the online accounts. They simply know mom paid the bills online and they may not even be sure about the bank.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Walsh says that the main problem is one of access. In many cases, we have made it virtually illegal for anyone else to use our online accounts.

It starts with those terms-of-service agreements; the fine print of the online world. Once the “I agree” button is pressed, it's as good as a contract.

SUZANNE WALSH: Many of them prohibit the sharing of passwords and they prohibit third-party access. So, right now, they tend to bar anybody but the account holder accessing the account.

HARI SREENIVASAN: That means —even if the account-holder is dead.

Internet service providers say, they're following the letter of the law as spelled out in the 1986 Stored Communications Act, which prohibits anyone from accessing private information online without permission.

SUZANNE WALSH: The problem with fiduciary access now is that it may be a violation of federal privacy law or a computer fraud and abuse act. It may be an actual criminal act to violate the terms of service agreement.

HARI SREENIVASAN: But being unable to access or shut down a deceased loved one's accounts could have unforeseen risks, as Glenn Williamson—who spent 20 years in online security—will tell you.

GLENN WILLIAMSON: The year after somebody passes is one of the most vulnerable times for identity theft. It's a heinous crime, but what the bad guys do, because death is public record, they'll go out there and they'll comb through recently deceased and they'll create a fake identity, because the deceased don't check email and they don't get the mail.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Every year, more than 2 million Americans are the posthumous victims of identity fraud.

Thieves can use a dead person's information to rack up credit card charges, apply for loans, or even file false tax returns.

And much of this information can be found on the internet through something as simple as a shopping account.

To date, only nine states have any laws in effect that govern online estate planning.

Suzanne Walsh, who chairs a committee on the Uniform Law Commission—an organization which drafts laws it hopes to standardize in all 50 states—is trying to change that.

Last year, Walsh's committee finished drafting a bill called the “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act”, which would give fiduciaries the same rights over online estates as they now have over physical estates.

SUZANNE WALSH: Fiduciaries, traditionally, have access to everything in admin—especially in administering estates. And that used to mean opening up the mailbox, opening up the file cabinet, rifling through the desk. Our act is designed to continue that and facilitate that, given the different nature of the digital assets.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The bill was reviewed and enacted by the Uniform Law Commission last July. But it's still up to individual state legislatures to propose it and pass it as law.

Although the act has been introduced in eighteen states, so far, only one state—Delaware—has signed the act into law.

However, the act is not without its critics. The general counsel of a Washington, DC-based group called “The State Privacy and Security Coalition”—which represents the interests of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, among others—came out against Delaware's new law, saying, quote, “This law takes no account of minimizing intrusions into the privacy of third parties who communicated with the deceased.

This would include highly confidential communications to decedents from third parties who are still alive… who would be very surprised that an executor is reviewing the communications.”

But, despite the pushback, Suzanne Walsh is hopeful that her committee's work will be recognized in more state legislatures.

SUZANNE WALSH: Widespread enactment is our goal. That's our primary goal. Certainly we hope and expect that it won't take more than a year or two for most of the states to adopt this product.

HARI SREENIVASAN: While the states debate the act, some internet service providers have begun proposing their own solutions to the problems raised by digital estates.

In 2013, Google introduced a new feature called “Inactive Account Manager”, which would give users the choice of having their accounts transferred to specific people after a set period of inactivity or having them automatically deleted.

And last month, Facebook announced their own feature for dealing with digital estate management called “Legacy Contacts”. Users can now choose a Facebook friend to maintain their account after they die, but the designated friend cannot delete the account or respond to messages intended for the deceased. Facebook users also have the option to have their account deleted upon their death.

But beyond new user features and state laws, there are steps that people can take now to make the process of digital estate management easier on next of kin.

First, create an inventory list of all your online accounts and passwords for your fiduciary. Stipulate what to do with your email accounts in a will, and read the terms-of-service agreements, so you can understand how or even if access to your accounts can be granted to someone else.

But Glenn Williamson says, no matter what steps you take or what laws are eventually passed, managing a digital estate for a loved one will always be a long, arduous, and painful process.