With the passage of time and the advancement of new technologies, a new paradigm has emerged: What happens to our data and our virtual world when we die? Apple has an answer to that and it’s called Digital Representative. if we die, an authorized person will have legal access to all our data and you can download them. And in this post we teach you how to configure it.
Apple Digital Representative
The figure of the Digital Representative is a person to whom we assign as responsible so that he treats, in a secure way and without the need for him to know our password, all our data from our Apple ID. The objective of this is not for that person to keep ownership of our account and be able to use it normally, as if it were us. Rather, it is the authorized access to the legacy of all our data so that, once we have died, they cannot be inaccessible or lost “through the internet”.
Thus, we guarantee a legal and regularized process, in which we can access the person’s data. This Digital Representative is configured from the iPhone itself and requires a series of steps that we are now going to explain. The first thing is to go to Settings> Apple ID (our name)> Password and security> Digital representative.
Once we are here, we have to select the person (or people) who will have access to our data when we are no longer there. The procedure is very easy. With only select who we want, click on the Continue button and we will automatically receive an email from Apple, indicating that the process has been completed. Initially, Apple recommends contacts that are in our iCloud Family Sharing group. But you can select any contact from your phonebook.
Now, there will still be one thing missing for the process to be 100% complete and that is to share the digital key with who will be our representative. To do this, we will have the option of sending it via iMessage or SMS, along with a message from Apple that we can edit, or print this key with the access QR, to have it in PDF or physical format. Of course, you have to know the following:
- Our digital representative will only be able to access our data through the link provided by Apple.
- You will need to enter all the key numbers and letters provided in the document.
- You will need to upload a copy of our death certificate.
After you have uploaded the required documents, you will have access to our photos, downloaded applications, calendar events and, in short, all the information of our Apple ID and iCloud. Keep in mind that apps that are paid for or require content to be licensed or unsubscribed will not be transferred to that person when we are dead. It is very important that you only add people who are very strictly trusted, as this is a sensitive subject. Also, if we add a digital representative and we want to print the certificate, we can enclose this together with the papers of our will, and it will remain as an inheritance to the person we want. In this way we ensure a legal procedure, and that ensures access and preservation of our data.
