When a person becomes incapacitated or after a person dies, there are significant challenges that fiduciaries and family members face when dealing with that person’s smartphones, computers, electronically stored information, online accounts, Internet domain names, and other digital property. The first challenges are finding the person’s digital property and identifying which digital property is valuable or significant. Then, fiduciaries have several additional, significant digital property obstacles to overcome, including: (1) passwords; (2) encryption; (3) federal and state criminal laws that penalize “unauthorized access” to computers and data (including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act); and (4) federal and state data privacy laws (including the Stored Communications Act).













