Advocacy

Protecting the Right to Remember

In today’s connected world, a lifetime of memories, creativity, and relationships lives online. Yet when someone passes away, that digital life can vanish — locked behind passwords or hidden within company systems that families cannot reach.

At Forevermore, we believe every person deserves the right to decide what happens to their digital life — and every family deserves clarity, compassion, and access when a loved one dies.

Why Digital Legacy Rights Matter

We live in an age where memories, relationships, and even parts of our identity live online. Yet when someone passes away, their digital life often becomes trapped behind company policies and outdated privacy laws.

Families can be left without access to treasured photos, personal messages, or documents of emotional and cultural value. Executors face enormous challenges proving authority, while companies — often operating across borders — rely on terms of service written for users, not heirs.

This is not simply an issue of technology; it is one of dignity, compassion, and human continuity.

Ensuring that people can safely and ethically pass on their digital legacies honours the fundamental human need to be remembered — and ensures that what we create and share online can continue to connect generations.

The Policy Gap

Despite the scale of our digital lives, most countries, including Australia, lack clear laws defining how digital assets are treated after death.

This has created a patchwork of inconsistent rules, where:

• Each technology company determines its own posthumous access policies;
• Families may have to pursue court orders simply to retrieve photos or data; and
• The privacy of the deceased is often placed in tension with the rights of those left behind.

Some jurisdictions, such as several U.S. states under the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), have taken steps to fix this. They provide a legal pathway for executors to manage digital assets much like physical ones.

Forevermore supports the adoption of similar reforms worldwide, to give individuals the power to plan ahead and families the right to fulfil those wishes.

Example Life Jounrey

What Forevermore Advocates For

Forevermore champions policy, practice, and technology reforms that uphold the following principles:

• Fair and Compassionate Access
  Families, executors, and nominated representatives should have clear, lawful access to digital accounts and data in accordance with a person’s expressed wishes.
• Clarity in Law
  Governments should define digital assets within estate, succession, and privacy laws, ensuring that digital legacies receive equal recognition to physical ones.
• Ethical Technology Design
  Technology companies should provide transparent, user-friendly options for digital-legacy planning — such as nomination of digital executors, memorialisation settings, and account transition tools.
• Privacy and Protection
  Access frameworks must preserve privacy and prevent misuse, while recognising the emotional and cultural importance of family access.
• International Cooperation
  Because digital lives transcend borders, nations should work together to harmonise digital-legacy laws and promote cross-jurisdictional respect for personal data after death.