After you’re gone, who gets your passwords?

A recent CyLab research paper sheds light on how older adults in the United States are navigating the challenge of digital estate planning, and gives insights into areas where current tools and practices fall short.

mercoledì 15 aprile 2026 New tab

1,115 words~5 min read

New CyLab research explores how older adults handle digital estate planning

Michael Cunningham

Apr 15, 2026

Source: Lujo Bauer Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University’s Societal Computing program, presents the paper “Passing Down Passwords: How Older Adults Approach Postmortem Account Access and Digital Estate Planning” at the 2026 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026) in Barcelona.

As more of life moves online, a new question is emerging alongside traditional wills and estate plans: what happens to our digital accounts after we die?

After you’re gone, who gets your passwords?

After you’re gone, who gets your passwords?

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