In what we call the 'real' world, bricks and mortar businesses are inexorably coming to the realization that over 80% of their business' value is intangibly trapped in information. Online, practically 100% of those assets are made up of information and the most valuable of all happens to be related to you.

Whether you're a business owner, a professional or simply a Web site visitor, your data is valuable. The deeper and more detailed, the better. The ability to create an accurate client profile is true power, and online businesses know it. They fight tooth and nail to attract new members, sign up subscribers and remain in front of as many contacts as possible.

Your contact information, work information and whatever other identity-related data they can cram into their customer databases is the valuable stuff that allows them to put a value on their company, even if that value is largely theoretical.

If companies go through all this trouble to get data, wouldn't it follow that their executives would sooner part with their coveted Reserved parking spots before they'd consider allowing a single, hard-earned individual entry to be removed from their customer relationship management database? Absolutely!

As long as the online businesses we deal with are subject to a privacy law based on the OECD data protection principles, as Canadian firms are, we can count on the fact that limited retention is legislated and may expect our data to be purged from their systems after a 'reasonable period of time'. What we should concern ourselves with is keeping track of all the data that's 'out there' in detailed online and offline profiles.

Social networking sites, email systems, domain profiles, file sharing and other data sharing systems, e-commerce marketplaces and online auctions all try to build detailed and complete profiles to allow for superfine customization of marketing messages the likes of which deliver real value to online advertisers.

With the near complete penetration of the Internet across all age groups and eventual decline of the strongest ranks described in the 90s best-seller "Boom, Bust and Echo", we are increasingly likely to hear the term 'digital estate planning' from the mouths of increasingly tech-savvy lawyers. Indeed, a search for this term yields a mere 65 hits on Google at the time of this writing, but give it a try in a year or two, and I guarantee that it'll have taken its rightful place in the legal vernacular.

Unfortunately, with our information spread across dozens, perhaps hundreds of Internet sites and corresponding numbers of back-end databases, DEP is easier said than done. Social networking sites such as Facebook likely consider their early policy of 'no deletion, only de-activation' to have been a key driver of explosive growth as their user base shot past 100 million.

Other sites that may have been more ethically inclined didn't have the same opportunity to rekindle relationships with returning users. With global pressure to adopt data protection best practices, more and more firms are finding that they need to offer options for purging individual information from their systems.
The potentially vast amounts of information about deceased, Internet-active individuals and business people in general may well turn into an insurmountable task for many, or an expensive task for a legal professional who wants to delve into DEP provisioning.

Sites such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Google all allow next-of-kin access to the deceased party's information upon presentation of proof of death and proof of relationship, but it is clear that a process needs to exist to manage all such related activities.

Such a process can be based on a solid foundation of privacy legislation but from the subject's perspective, it needs not contradict any existing best practices with regard to password management and profile maintenance.

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