What should happen to your personal digital communications — emails, chats, photos and the like — after you die? Should they be treated like physical letters for the purposes of a will?

Yahoo doesn’t think so. The company is criticizing new legislation giving executors charged with carrying out the instructions in a person’s will broad access to their online accounts. The legislation aims to tackle the sensitive question of what to do when someone’s online accounts on sites like Facebook, Google or Yahoo outlive them.

This past summer, Delaware signed into law the “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act.” It was modeled after legislation approved earlier by the Uniform Law Commission, a nonprofit group that drafts and lobbies for new state laws. In Delaware, the measure removes some of the hurdles that an estate attorney or other fiduciary would otherwise have to go through to gain broad access to the deceased’s online accounts.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…