Legacy Locker

» see legacylocker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Around 2009 a real problem surfaced in a lot of households at once. Somebody died, and the family discovered that the photographs were in an account nobody had the password to, and the terms of service said that account was non-transferable. The first generation to put its whole life online had started reaching the end of its life, and none of the infrastructure had been built with that in mind.

Legacy Locker was founded in 2008 by Jeremy Toeman and Adam Burg to sit in that gap. It debuted publicly on TechCrunch on 10 March 2009 and opened to customers that April, pitched at ordinary people and at professional estate planners who had started getting the question from clients. You deposited your credentials in the vault and named who should receive what, and on verified notice of your death the service handed them over. It cost $29.99 a year, or $300 once, for life.

It read well in the press. CNN and NPR both covered the digital-afterlife idea in May 2009 with Legacy Locker as the example, and for a couple of years it was the name people reached for when the subject came up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The hard part of this business was never the vault. Encrypting a list of passwords is a solved problem. The hard part is the trigger: proving to a machine that a specific person is actually dead, and doing it in a way that a grieving relative can complete but a motivated attacker cannot. Legacy Locker handled it with nominated verifiers and death certificates, which is the only answer anyone has, and it is a slow and human one.

The deeper problem was that the product asked for a kind of trust almost nothing else asks for. You were handing your entire identity to a startup on the understanding that it would still be solvent and still honoring the arrangement on an unknown date decades away. Archive Team spotted this in 2013 and said so bluntly, calling out the lifetime promise and advising people to just say no. They published that warning the same year the company was sold.

~ the sixty days ~

On 20 November 2013, days after closing a $6 million Series A led by OMERS Ventures, the Montreal password manager PasswordBox announced it had acquired Legacy Locker. The terms for existing users were sixty more days of service and a free lifetime PasswordBox subscription for anyone whose account was created before 20 January 2014. After that date, the company said, all data on Legacy Locker's servers would be securely destroyed.

So the vault built to survive its customers was emptied on a Monday in January, four years and nine months after it opened, and the lifetime subscription was honored by being transferred into a different company's lifetime subscription. That one did not last either. Intel Security bought PasswordBox in December 2014 and folded it into a product called True Key, which Intel in turn retired years later.

I was twenty five when Legacy Locker launched, and nobody is twenty five and buying a will. The whole category reads differently now that I am forty two and have accounts older than some of my colleagues. The service was not wrong about the problem. Seventeen years on, the honest state of the art for what happens to your accounts when you die is still a sealed envelope in a drawer, which is where my generation's parents kept it, and which does not go out of business.

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