As I was reading through an article about this teenager who committed suicide I started wondering about what would happen to all your social media accounts after you die. I realized that blockchain based dapps have the regular social media beat on this avenue too.
The regular social media websites like Facebook and Instagram, they will keep the account of the deceased locked and sealed for ‘eternity’. It would be prudent to mention here that when you share content on centralized websites like these, you grant them partial rights to your original content. This could effectively mean that your loved ones may never be able to benefit from the content (art, video, songs, etc) that you created there.
The way around this is that you specifically leave a will mentioning that your immediate family or maybe a close friend should be granted the rights to your social media account. This could also be done directly by leaving the password with somebody else or you can directly contact the company and officially appoint somebody to be the trustee/or a legacy account holder.
In case you haven’t taken care of this by now then the chances are that you are probably one of those people that also never read the terms and conditions of making your social media account. Don’t worry most of us are like that because the stuff that we put on these websites is usually casual and we don’t really care what happens to it afterwards.
As for an artist or somebody who has valuable original content in there, they should make sure that he/she handles every detail….. and I mean every detail. See the thing is that even if by some miracle your family is granted access to your account, the legal ownership of the content in there might not actually be granted to them. This means that your content might not be able profit them financially as it did you.
Please don’t accuse me of being callous and not caring for the emotional value of somebodies work. This post is not about that and that line of thought is actually a bit arrogant..... I doubt if the emotional value of even one single word ever spoken by anybody can even be captured in a single post.
Now if you haven’t done anything that would allow your family to access your work just in case you kick the bucket, then what can be done? In such a scenario your family would need to have a court order to access your account. This would mean that unless you were murdered or have committed suicide, then getting a court order won’t be an easy thing. Even then this could be contested by a social media giant in an upper level court.
Did my last few words made you nervous…… well this is the ugly nature of this system. The thing is that unless these social media giants are not worried about their bottom line, they won’t be giving two shits about you. The data suggests that thousands and thousands of social media users die every day. 'Easily' granting access to the family of even one deceased person opens up a whole ‘can of worms’ for these entities.
Although the murder/suicide investigation itself would make sure that your accounts are made accessible. If nothing else then at least for the duration of the investigation. Even then the chances are that they will allow the police to access it and not the family. And even if they do allow you access, they would only do so for the duration of the investigation.
As for your Steemit account ….. It’s simple. The fact is that the one who has the keys to your account, controls it. You lose those keys and you lose your account. This means that if we leave the keys in our will to our loved ones then this would allow them to have access to our content on the blockchain itself.
Another simple way could be to break the keys in parts and hand the pieces to the ones you trust. If I was some great content creator then I would leave the keys amongst my immediate blood and a few people from Steem community who I trust.
This is not even the biggest advantage that you have on a decentralized network. A bigger advantage would be that the copyright of your work won’t be infringed or affected by any social media giant in any way.
EDIT:
Please do check out this post by 