Michigan Legislature Addresses Digital Estates

It's a start.  The Michigan legislature now has a raft of bills assigned to the all-encompassing Judiciary Committee that would amend our current probate code to provide for handling of a deceased person's so-called digital assets.

Digital assets would include electronically stored photos, Facebook, iTunes, eTrade, data collections of any type, even including a person's email accounts.  If the bills pass, a personal representative could petition a county probate court for assess to these accounts.

Some legal experts, however, see problems with a conflict of laws.  Even if our state probate code, the Estates and Protected Individuals Code, is amended to provide for a personal representative's access to digital assets, federal laws prohibit such access by anyone other than the account holder.

In addition to complications from the federal Stored Communications Act, many of the specific terms-of-service for accounts prohibit access to a particular account by anyone other than the original account holder. There are also concerns arising from user consent to such disclosures in the privacy law context.  So the experts smell complicated litigation arising from the effects of these digital asset bills.

The proposed legislation also contains a provision that allows an interested party to file a petition seeking to limit or eliminate the power of the personal representative over the digital assets.  If the decedent has implicated family members in some of the electronically stored data, the situation is certainly ripe for some digital probate litigation.

So we will site back and see just where this legislation goes.  Stay tuned for future developments.

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Google Rolls-Out Social Media & Digital Estate Plan

Truly, Google is everywhere.  Now, the Big Data company is looking to get into your [digital] estate plan; and with some good reason.

Right around tax-time last month, Google rolled out its "digital afterlife" feature -technically and officially known as the inactive account manager.  This tool allows Google users to provide Google with specific instructions about what to do with their Google data when they die.

Google has billed this feature as something to make it easier for a user or a user's personal representative to manage a person's personal data -one's "digital estate"- after death.  The inactive account manager was initially touted in the Google Public Policy Blog.

Nearly everyone has a Google account.  Many of us have developed complex electronic profiles over the past decade; some of those profiles even have value.

The law has not caught-up with our electronic profiles.  To date, only five states -Connecticut, Idaho, Rhode Island, Indiana, and Oklahoma have estate laws addressing digital assets.  Not to worry, however, as the Uniform Law Commission has set about drafting a proposed uniform digital estate law that will make it much easier for other states, including Michigan, to adopt the appropriate legislation.

As time marches on, Google's inactive account manager is banking on the specter that a majority of their user's will want to preserve, protect or direct their data profiles.  The inactive account manager is designed to aid in this task.

It is a very 21st Century concept.  We here at the electronic  probate attorney wonder what this account manager will look like in, say, 100-years from now.

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