A TechStuff listener named Keith wrote in a while back and asked an interesting question. Keith wanted to know what would happen to the information you store online in the event of your death. If you used cloud services like Google Docs, would a beneficiary be able to retrieve the information? Would the service delete the account? Would it just remain dormant online until the end of time (or at least until the end of the Internet)? And what about all the people you interact with online? How could your surviving friends and family contact these people and let them know what happened if they don’t have access to your account?

The short answer is that unless your beneficiaries wade through complicated legal maneuvers, your information will remain locked away in most cases. Yuki Noguchi of NPR points out many of the problems with accessing a deceased person’s information online. Noguchi quotes lawyer John Dozier, Jr. who points out the main problem is that technological developments are outpacing the law. In a way, it’s very similar to the financial side of many Web services — the first step is figuring out how to create the service. The next step is finding a way to make money off of it. Some services, like Twitter, are still trying to achieve that second step. The legal issues follow the same pattern.