Fiduciary Access To Digital Assets And Accounts

Traditionally, a person's most valuable assets to be distributed upon death consisted of tangible items such as real property, cash, jewelry and personal effects of sentimental value like photographs and letters.  However, the advent of the digital age has brought a shift from file cabinets, mailmen and photo albums to cloud storage, e-mail accounts and online photo streams.  Today, virtually everyone has at least some assets that are not physical, but are stored as data and accessed via the Internet.  "Digital assets" may include, for example, text messages, instant messaging accounts, e-mails, documents, audio or video images and sounds, social media content, health insurance records, source code, software, databases, online bank accounts, blogs, and the user names and passwords necessary to access online accounts, among other things.  More specifically, consider a person's PayPal or Venmo accounts, which might contain large sums of money, or Google, Yahoo,