The Digital Estate

Few people know that they can manage their digital estate—or how to do so. Although everyone will inevitably have to—or should—deal with estate planning issues at some point in their lives, many do not know what a digital estate is, what data, contractual relationships, and usage rights are associated with it, or whether the topic might even be relevant to them. Furthermore, many contracts for digital products are drafted unilaterally to the detriment of consumers due to the providers’ strong economic position. The terms and conditions in these contracts may comply with the law, but they are nonetheless not consumer-friendly and usually do not provide for any options regarding digital estates.

Against this backdrop, the three project partners—Fraunhofer SIT, the University of Bremen, and the University of Regensburg—examined the topic of digital estates from legal and technical perspectives from May through December 2019. The aim of the study is to identify the options available for planning one’s digital estate, to highlight the potential disadvantages consumers currently face in this regard, and to provide recommendations on how the transferability of digital assets can be improved to better serve consumer interests. These issues are examined from the perspectives of inheritance law, data protection law, copyright law, and consumer protection law, as well as from a technical standpoint.

In a total of nine chapters, the study addresses, among other things, the questions of what assets constitute a person’s digital estate, whether and how digital content can be inherited, whether an absolute right to personal data is necessary, to what extent “postmortem data protection law” currently exists and whether it needs to be expanded, whether providers of digital assets unduly disadvantage consumers with their contractual provisions regarding digital estates, and how the planning of a digital estate can be technically supported.